Windows performance counter definitions

For example, Windows has a built-in single-instance counterset named "Memory" that reports on global memory usage. Multi-instance countersets contain data for a variable number of instances. This is common for countersets that report about entities within the system. For example, Windows has a built-in multi-instance counterset named "Processor Information" that reports one instance for each installed CPU. Consumers will periodically collect and record the data from a provider's counterset.

For example, the consumer might collect data once per second or once per minute. The data collected is called a sample. A sample consists of timestamps along with the data for instances of the counterset. The data for each instance includes the instance name string and a set of counter values integers, one value for each counter in the counterset.

Instance names should normally be unique within a sample, i. Some older providers do not follow this rule, so consumers must be able to tolerate non-unique instance names.

Instance names are not case-sensitive, so instances should not have names that differ only in case. For backwards-compatibility reasons, the "Process" counterset returns non-unique instance names based on the EXE filename.

This can cause confusing results, especially when a process with a non-unique name starts up or shuts down, as this will typically result in data glitches due to incorrect matching of instance names between samples. Consumers of the "Process" counterset must be able to tolerate these non-unique instance names and the resulting data glitches. Instance names must be stable across samples, i.

Each counter has a type. The counter type indicates the type of the counter's raw value either unsigned bit integer or unsigned bit integer. The counter type also indicates what the counter's raw value represents, which determines how the raw value should be processed to generate useful statistics.

While some counter types are simple and have a raw value that is directly useful, many counter types require additional processing to create a useful formatted value. To produce the formatted value, some counter types require raw values from two samples, some counter types require timestamps, and some counter types require raw values from multiple counters.

For example:. Providers are expected to behave as if they are stateless, i. GetTimestamp So thank you for helping me see why my AverageTimer32 values were so strange. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. The simplest counter; just displays the raw number without any calculations; the HEX variants indicate that the values should be displayed as hexadecimal instead of decimal.

Used to display fractions instead of integers like with NumberOfItems ; usually interpreted as percentage. Percentage of maximum allowed concurrent database connections; RawFraction : current connection count; RawBase : maximum connection count. Usually used to describe the average count of items in a queue; if you have 0 items at the beginning, and 10 items after 5 seconds, then the rate would be displayed as 2. Shows the average number of operations completed in one second according to MSDN.

Web requests served per second; for each served request, you would call Increment on the counter. Used to display how many items were — in average — processed per second during the last time frame.

Seems to be identical to SampleCounter. Used to display the percent of time that a component is active CounterTimer or inactive CounterTimerInverse. Work exactly as their non-multi counterparts e.

Displays the difference between the raw value at the beginning and the end of the measured time frame. Instead, specify the strings as values of the attribute that you are setting. When installing your application, run the LodCtr. The LodCtr. You must have administrator privileges to run LodCtr. Example installation command:. If you need to update a counterset, be sure to uninstall the old counterset using the UnlodCtr. Intuitive to Use. Easy to manage.

Find out how you can reduce cost, increase QoS and ease planning, as well. Unfortunately, I do not know exactly which performance counters I can monitor and what their names are.

Where can I find a list of available performance counters and how can I add them to the sensor for monitoring? The list of available performance counters can rather vary, depending on the target system. In addition, this list can be very long because there are usually hundreds of these counters. Thus, it is not possible to have a whole list of counters available in PRTG.

To find out which performance counters are available on your system and how to add them to PRTG, follow the steps below. After clicking Create in the add sensor dialog, PRTG will immediately start to monitor the corresponding performance counter. See My performance counter sensor does not work.