Currently the Polling Rate perfmon counters for installed modules on polling engines are only populated if one or more nodes with that module's polling type are assigned to that polling engine. That means that when we apply a polling rate perfmon counter to all of our polling engines, it shows up as Unknown on any polling engine that doesn't have any applicable nodes assigned to it. See attached pic below for more info.
For example, we have 9 polling engines in total, but our VMware nodes (vCenters and ESX Hosts) are all assigned to our primary polling engine. Therefore the VIM Polling Rate perfmon counter shows up as Unknown on all of the Orion Server application monitors except for the Primary Polling engine. Obviously the solution is to go in and Edit the Application Monitor for the ones it is Unknown in and disable the component. However, the problem is that if we assign VMware nodes to different polling engines in the future we probably won't remember to go in and Enable the component for those. And it's not just the VIM Polling Rate counter, there are other lesser used Polling Rate counters like the F5 one, the Wireless one, and the UnDP ones just as a couple of examples. It's a real pain to have to have manually disable and enable these counters as we move things around...
Why don't these counters just populate with 0% if there aren't any applicable nodes assigned to the engine? If the module is installed, please populate the perfmon counter with the polling rate, even if that rate is 0% because it really makes it quite unwieldy to manage, especially for large environments like ours. It will especially be a pain when we implement the automated polling engine balance script I'm working on. I'm going to have to code a function into it just to manage the Enabling/Disabling of these components into the script. It's already going to be complicated without having to add that bit in there...
(And yes, I know that what I'm talking about here is a problem with monitoring something with SAM. However, SAM isn't the problem here, it's just being used to detect the problem. The problem is the way that any Orion module populates perfmon counters. Since NPM has been traditionally considered the "Core" product, even though it really isn't anymore, I put this request here for maximum visibility and applicability. )
