Community
- Command Central
- MVP Program
- Monthly Mission
- Blogs
- Groups
- Events
- Media Vault
Products
- Observability
- Network Management
- Application Management
- IT Security
- IT Service Management
- System Management
- Database Management
Content Exchange
- SolarWinds Platform
- Server & Application Monitor
- Database Performance Analyzer
- Server Configuration Monitor
- Network Performance Monitor
- Network Configuration Manager
- SQL Sentry
- Web Help Desk
Free Tools & Trials
Store

WMI vs SNMP vs RPC

Has anyone tried to monitor the same process via SNMP, WMI, and RPC and noticed the different readings on Windows Server (2008 R2 in my case)?

If I monitor sqlservr.exe, or w3wp.exe or inetinfo.exe or snmp.exe I get different readings, particularly for physical memory used. I also sometimes see virtual memory and sometimes not.

Seems like SNMP process monitoring cannot read virtual memory. Also this method reports the physical memory from the Memory (Private Working Set) reading, while WMI uses the Working Set (Memory) value. These can be seen in either perfmon or by adding columns to the taskmanager view.

Which should I use? WMI value is always much larger than SNMP for my inetinfo.exe processes, but SQLservr.exe process values are much closer.

Find more posts tagged with

Accepted answers

All comments

mdriskell

Just my two cents but I don't know if memory readings are an accurate thing to compare...take 15 readings consecutively with the same utility and they will probably vary to some degree. Memory and CPU are in a constant state of flux unless the process has a set cap.

MrSampsonite

CPU tends to vary much more than memory. I'm not concerned about a few megabytes here and there, but if one says 1MB consistently and the other method says 300MB consistently, we're not talking about fluxuations. We're talking about measuring different things.

For a memory starved system, knowing who is stealing it all is important, especially if sustained or a sudden spike occurs.

aLTeReGo

Which component monitor types are we comparing, and what are the Application template polling intervals? Also, if you compare to Task Manager which is more accurate? Lastly, can you provide a screenshot so we can see what you're looking at?

Questionario

We also noticed this and WMI/RPC are not even able to poll processes that use more than 4GB correctly.

We have case 290270 open for this.

MrSampsonite

These are all process monitors, either via snmp, wmi, or rpc using APM. Polling interval I think is 10 minutes. They don't fluctuate much so they are pretty consistent. I posted above which values each seems to correspond to (in task manager). In server 2008 task manager you can add lots of columns including multiple memory readings. The ones that match are listed above.