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I have a specific setup I'm investigating to solve a specific need we have:

I have a lab that consists of 3 machines, which runs load tests and oversees other investigations as needed. During the load tests, we have the load tests gather all pertinent statistics (such as disk counters and CPU usage data). However, outside of the load tests we do not currently have a way that accomplishes both of the following:

  • Allows us to gather detailed hardware counters
  • Allows us to organize these in a logical way
  • Allows us to monitor the servers for operational management (disk space remaining, primarily)

So right now I'm evaluating a couple of different options. Some are paid and the others are... Perfmon. It will give me the detail I want and it will shove the data into a SQL database and it will also work well with Windows Alerts for disk space remaining alerts.

It also can work remotely. So here's the setup I currently have:

  • One Windows Server 2008 R2 - Designated "Monitoring"
  • Lab Machines

On the Monitoring box, I have Perfmon running and I have added all of the counters I want to have gathered to the Performance Monitoring window in the GUI. This took ~20 minutes, as there were a ton of counters I wanted to gather for the SQL Server box.

I couldn't import these counters from any Data Collection set template or anything because the counters have to actually be running in the Performance Monitor window, and then you can use data collection templates to organize data collection sets however you like.

It is running nicely now, and is beautifully pumping data into the SQL Server... however the initial setup is troubling.

We may have to stop/start/reboot this monitoring server regularly and if it is going to take ~20-30 minutes to set up the counters each time, as well as this being manual, this could cause problems.

My question is this: is there any way to automate the counters that Perfmon gathers, given that they are spread across 3 remote machines? Note that Perfmon is not actually "Connecting to a remote machine" I am instead just noting different machine names in the perfmon counters.

1 Answer 1

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Use Logman - export one to XML once you've set it up, and then import it when you need it again.

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