5 Windows performance counters

Overview

You can effectively monitor Windows performance counters using the perf_counter[] key.

For example:

perf_counter["\Processor(0)\Interrupts/sec"]

or

perf_counter["\Processor(0)\Interrupts/sec", 10]

For more information on using this key, see WIN32-specific item keys.

In order to get a full list of performance counters available for monitoring, you may run:

typeperf -qx

Numeric representation

As the naming of performance counters may differ on different Windows servers, depending on local settings, it introduces a certain problem when creating a template for monitoring several Windows machines having different locales.

At the same time every performance counter can also be referred to by its numeric form, which is unique and exactly the same regardless of language settings, so you might use the numeric representation instead of strings.

To find out the numeric equivalents, run regedit, then find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib\009.

The registry entry contains information like this:

1
       1847
       2
       System
       4
       Memory
       6
       % Processor Time
       10
       File Read Operations/sec
       12
       File Write Operations/sec
       14
       File Control Operations/sec
       16
       File Read Bytes/sec
       18
       File Write Bytes/sec
       ....

Here you can find the corresponding numbers for each string part of the performance counter, like in '\System\% Processor Time':

System → 2
       % Processor Time → 6

Then you can use these numbers to represent the path in numbers:

\2\6

Performance counter parameters

You can deploy some PerfCounter parameters for the monitoring of Windows performance counters.

For example, you can add these to the Zabbix agent configuration file:

   PerfCounter=UserPerfCounter1,"\Memory\Page Reads/sec",30
          or
          PerfCounter=UserPerfCounter2,"\4\24",30

With such parameters in place, you can then simply use UserPerfCounter1 or UserPerfCounter2 as the keys for creating the respective items.

Remember to restart Zabbix agent after making changes to the configuration file.

Troubleshooting

Sometimes Zabbix agent cannot retrieve performance counter values in Windows 2000-based systems, because the pdh.dll file is outdated. It shows up as failure messages in Zabbix agent and server log files. In this case pdh.dll should be updated to a newer 5.0.2195.2668 version.