Microsoft releases Windows Performance Analyzer with AI tracing support

Windows developers have long faced a knowledge barrier when diagnosing application performance. The Windows Performance Analyzer tool itself is powerful but requires users to understand Event Tracing for Windows logs and have significant experience interpreting trace data. By embedding GitHub Copilot CLI directly into the analyzer, Microsoft is lowering that barrier: developers can now pose questions in plain English and let the AI do the pattern-matching and hypothesis-building across complex trace files.

This move reflects a broader trend of using large language models to simplify expert tools. Rather than forcing developers to learn specialized log analysis syntax or manually hunt through thousands of events, Copilot can read the trace, synthesize the data, and present findings in a clear report. The sample prompt Microsoft provided—asking Copilot to prioritize evidence of slowness such as CPU starvation, disk bottlenecks, and memory pressure—illustrates how the tool can guide analysis toward the most likely culprits.