Version

All

Date

12 Mar 2008

Summary

Performance Counters from a target machine are unavailable to the Argent Guardian Performance Rules.

Technical Background

Performance Counters may not be available because of an inability to connect to the server or the performance counters do not exist on the server, and they should.

Resolution

Log in as the Argent Service account.

Run a Connectivity and Accessibility test against the target machine from ADMINISTRATION icon > License Manager > Licensed Servers Tab, double click the server, click the Connectivity And Accessibility Test button.

It will try to gain access to the target machine as the Argent Service account and let you know if it has issues getting to PerfMon.

While logged on to the server as the Argent Service Account, bring up PerfMon, click + button at the top, and UNC to the target server (i.e.: \\servername) and try to pull down the performance counters.

If it tells you “unable to connect to machine” then the Argent service account may not have local admin rights to the server; OR the Remote Registry service needs to be bounced.

In Many cases, restarting the Remote Registry service on the target machine will allow the Argent Guardian to be able to read the HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Perf* (PerfDisk, PerfProc, PerfNet, PerfOS) keys.

Finally, if you are able to pull back Counters in PerfMon from the Remote Machine as the Argent Service account, make sure the counter you’re looking for is actually on that machine.

For instance, on W2000 machines, it seems that the LOGICAL DISK counters are not enabled by default, hence, many of the rules looking at Logical Disk space will fail as the Logical Disk counter does NOT exist on the server.

You can of course run the Extensible Counters List tool from Microsoft which allows you to turn ON performance counters that may have been turned off, after which you would restart the Remote Registry service on the Target Machine.

But in many cases, for W2000 servers, you will have to open a command line and run “DISKPERF-YV“. In order for this to take effect, you will have to REBOOT the target machine. Afterwards the Logical Disk counters should appear in PerfMon.

For W2003 servers, simply opening a command prompt and running the LODCTR /R command from the system32 directory will re-read all performance DLL’s and after a restart of the remote registry service make missing counters available to remote machines.