As I was faced in troubleshooting MS Windows performance issues I stumbled over the following article that is really worth to be read:

Official Microsoft Article dealing about performance monitoring
[1] http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.08.pulse.aspx?pr=blog

Customizing Perfmon
[2] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/283110
[3] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300884/en-us

Afterwards I was thinking of putting the logs into excel and to work with different kinds of formatting and counters to make the
conclusions easier and more visible, but already there is one really cool tool.

PAL
- It collects the performance counters from perfmon!
- Generates a HTML page!
- Provides the ability to implement own thersholds!

[4] http://www.codeplex.com/PAL

Description
Ever have a performance problem, but don’t know what performance counters to collect or how to analyze them? The PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool is a new and powerful tool that reads in a performance monitor counter log (any known format) and analyzes it using complex, but known thresholds (provided). The tool generates an HTML based report which graphically charts important performance counters and throws alerts when thresholds are exceeded. The thresholds are originally based on thresholds defined by the Microsoft product teams and members of Microsoft support, but continue to be expanded by this ongoing project. This tool is not a replacement of traditional performance analysis, but it automates the analysis of performance counter logs enough to save you time. This is a VBScript and requires Microsoft LogParser (free download).

Perfmon Log Translator (PLT)

Release Notes
Perfmon Log Translator Tool (PLT) tool translates perfmon logs captured in other spoken languages and translates them to another spoken language such as English. This allows tools such as the PAL tool to process perfmon logs since PAL requires English perfmon logs.

[5] http://www.codeplex.com/PAL/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=21261