Analyzing Performance Data in PowerPivot

PowerPivot is an absolutely fantastic performance analysis tool. You might say that I'm biased, but wait until you see firsthand how easy it is to analyze large amounts of performance data from any number of computers. For example, I recently had to analyze resource utilization in a SharePoint farm with 16 front-end servers, 8 Excel Services application servers, 4 PowerPivot application servers, and 2 content database servers. Each load test sampled a variety of performance counters from all of these servers in one-second intervals and generated over 250 million rows of data, and I needed to analyze this data for individual servers as well as for server roles. Sounds like a lot of work? Piece of cake if you use PowerPivot! Here are the steps: