7 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 or its English-only equivalent perf_counter_en, see Windows-specific item keys.

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

typeperf -qx

You may also use low-level discovery to discover multiple object instances of Windows performance counters and automate the creation of perf_counter items for multiple instance objects.

Numeric representation

Windows maintains numeric representations (indexes) for object and performance counter names. Zabbix supports these numeric representations as parameters to the perf_counter, perf_counter_en item keys and in PerfCounter, PerfCounterEn configuration parameters.

However, it's not recommended to use them unless you can guarantee your numeric indexes map to correct strings on specific hosts. If you need to create portable items that work across different hosts with various localized Windows versions, you can use the perf_counter_en key or PerfCounterEn configuration parameter which allow to use English names regardless of system locale.

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.