Using Reliability Monitor in Windows 7

Before you start

Objectives: Learn how to open and use Reliability Monitor in Windows 7.

Prerequisites: you have to know what is Reliability Monitor.

Key terms: Reliability Monitor, Windows 7


 Reliability Monitor

To find open Reliability Monitor, we can enter “perfmon /rel” in Search box. The Reliability Monitor monitor shows us information about the application, Windows, and misc failures, as well as other warnings and information.

 1 Reliability Monitor

Reliability Monitor

Note that in our case we have one failure (marked with red x icon) in the Application failures row. Also, we have info icons for every day. If we look at the bottom of the window, we will see more detail about the events on the selected day.

 2 Details

List of Events on Specific Day

On the Action column we can check for solutions or view technical details about our events.

Note that not all days are visible on the graph. To go back in time, we can click on the left arrow. We can go back up to one year. Also, we can change the view by days or weeks. The great thing about Reliability Monitor is that we can see what happened and when it happened on our system. Prior to Windows 7 we couldn’t do that without searching multiple logs in the Event Viewer.

Note that in our case we had several critical events on the 24 of March 2015. We also had several installation and configuration events. The Reliability Monitor also gives us a stability scale. If we have errors, the stability index will start to come down. Any change you make to your computer or problem that occurs on your computer affects the stability index. In our case the stability index is rising, since we didn’t have any critical events for several days.