Performance Rules use W200x performance counters.

Over 2,000 counters are available and both Microsoft and third-party products add additional counters. For example, if you use Oracle, then Oracle adds over 300 counters related to the performance of the Oracle databases.

Save Performance Data To The Argent Predictor

The Argent Predictor is Argent’s capacity planning and trend analysis product. By checking this option on the Performance Rule each time the Rule is run, the data point is added to the Argent Predictor – the data is saved in the Argent Predictor for later trend analysis and capacity planning.

Note: it’s not each time the Rule is broken, rather it is each time the Rule is run.

For example, if the Rule is run once a minute, but is broken once a day, then 1,440 data points will be added to the Argent Predictor each day, not just one data point.

Creating A Performance Rule

There are two secondary screens used when creating or editing a Performance Rule – the C46A screen and the C46B screen.

The Performance Rule Criteria Screen – C46A

Here the first section of C46A — the Type Of Performance Metric — is described.

Rule Is Broken If

In the lower section of the C46A screen you define the value causing the Rule to break.

In this example the value specified is ’95’ – if the value exceeds 95 the Rule breaks.

Of course the value is specific to the counter – this ’95’ is real page faults per second. For disk free space it will be – not surprisingly – the disk’s free space value.

Fail Rule If The Data Is Unavailable Or Nonexistent

Sometimes when a performance counter is checked, the counter is not available.

This can be caused by many reasons: the counter was for an application that’s been de-installed; the Microsoft counter is temporarily unavailable – the world’s knowledge bases overflow with descriptions of this error; the kernel is having temporarily a Bad Hair Day — counter is available most of the time, just not at this instant in time.

Regardless of the cause, you have to decide how you want to process this case.

It can be useful to set this flag so if the counter you want to check is temporarily or permanently not available, then you tell the Rule to consider this an out-of-bounds condition and tell the Rule to fail.

The Criteria Must Be Met For More Than X Seconds

By setting this optional field, the Rule tests to ensure the counter is out of bounds for the specified number of seconds.

In the example of the Pages/Sec counter, were you to set this field to ’30’, then the counter would have to exceed the value for 30 continuous seconds.