Using windows Performance Tools / xperf programmatically?

[ikantspelwurdz]

Suppose I want to make a program that, every minute, will cout various data about system utilization (CPU usage, network in, network out, disk reads, disk writes, etc). And I want it to keep CPU usage at a minimum. Once I've got the program doing this basic task, I'll want to expand on it to do slightly fancier stuff.

Is Windows Performance Analysis Tools / Xperf a good way to accomplish this? If so, what exactly is involved in this? Are there libraries I can use, or is there just a command line tool, and I'll have to invoke it silently and have my program parse its output?