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Performance Counter Monitor - Rate vs Counter

I am trying to add a new Performance Counter Monitor to gather some performance information. It is working great, but the data returned from Windows is a counter (it starts a 1 and increments). So, the Statistic Data is rather confusing when viewing it in the web console (it is currently "9672056.00" and growing). Is there a way to have APM collect this counter data and be able to display it as changes per interval? I am not interested in the count of the information, I want to know how much it is incrementing. I know the Universal Device Poller does this for SNMP data easily. But this data is only accessible through perfmon or WMI.

For reference, the data I am pulling is Category = "IAS Accounting Server" and Counter = "Accounting-Requests", but I suspect this applies to many differnet counters in Perfmon besides this one.

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jeremiahmcclain

This is a confusing topic for me as well. From what I have read, there are two types of WMI counters, one is raw and the other cooked. The latter based on raw data calculated for some interval of time. I am not sure that this is correct or a good way to explain. I have just started my foray into the world of WMI myself. I would suggest downloading WMI Explorer to look at the counters that are available on the particular server in question. Ideally, APM should work with WMI counters like NPM does with SNMP, meaning take two raw values and calculate the difference. That would work in some cases, however there are things like logins/sec that seem to just continue to increment a counter. Still trying to figure it out.

mcbridea

Hi Andrew and jeremiah,

Your not alone being confused by this one. I'm far from an expert on WMI but here is what I have found. WMI has Raw counters and formatted counters. The formatted ones are the "cooked" counters. I have included a screen shot of the SolarWinds WMI free tool WMI browser. I filtered by "Formattted Performance Counters". You can see the cooked counters like available memory in MB. If I track this counter it works well as MS is doing the math behind getting me this number. If the counter is a rolling counter like you described it just does not work well. It is possible to write a script to convert the returned rolling counter number but this would not be trivial.

I'll mark this thread for the Product Manager so he can consider a WMI number converter as a possible feature enhancement. No promises though.

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