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WMI Process CPU Usage versus System CPU?

I am a bit confused because I have an APM WMI process monitor telling me that the SQL process on one of my systems is using 98% CPU however the actual CPU utilization on the system only shows 3% Utilized. What am I missing here?

Thanks in advance for any explanation of this.

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Accepted answers

aLTeReGo

For what it's worth I would also recommend upgrading to APM v4.0.2 as there have been numerous bug fixes that may resolve the issue you're seeing. We also included the RPC protocol as an alternative fetching method to WMI. It's a very worth while upgrade.

All comments

RogerWong

Hi, Byron. That's a bug in APM 3.0. The APM 3.0 WMI process monitor fails to take hyperthreading into account, so CPU% measurements from a hyperthreaded CPU may be inflated.

If you are on active maintenance, please consider joining the release candidate program for the next version of APM. I don't know if sign-ups are open for that just yet, but the RC program would allow you to get fixes for some known bugs ahead of the official release date.

byrona

We are on an active maintenance contract so I will be sure to watch for the RC.

3% to 98% seems more than just a bit inflated, does it currently take multiple CPU's into consideration?

RogerWong

By inflated, I meant "really, really wrong".

Non-hyperthreaded, multi-core CPUs are fine according to the bug report I just read. It's the hyperthreaded CPUs that have X number of physical cores but Y number of logical cores that confuse the APM WMI process monitor.

byrona

Ah, ok. I can definitely agree with the "really, really wrong" part.

Thanks for the followup!

Ralphr

We are running APM 3.5 and are seeing the same thing. APM says that the sql server service is using 95% of the CPU but the average server CPU use is about half of that .

byrona

Well, since upgrading I can't say I have seen the problem but I also haven't been looking for it. However, in order to optimize APM I would recommend switching as much stuff as possible away from WMI and using SNMP as an alternative. In my experience WMI has been slow and clunky compared to SNMP.

aLTeReGo