Troubleshooting Counter Collection Problems

As you come to rely on counter logs for detecting and diagnosing common performance problems, you will develop less and less tolerance for any problems that interfere with your ability to gather counter logs reliably. Most of the counter collection problems you are likely to encounter are associated with unreliable extended counters supplied by third-party Performance Library DLLs. In this section, a variety of troubleshooting procedures to cope with common counter collection problems are discussed.

Missing Performance Counters

When Performance Monitoring API calls that are routed via Pdh.dll to Performance Library DLLs fail, counter values that you expected to gather are missing. (See the discussion earlier in this chapter about the internal architecture of the performance monitoring API in the section entitled “Counter Log Scenarios.”) When these failures occur, the Performance Data Helper library routines attempt to document the error condition and isolate the failing component so that the component does not cause system-wide failure of the performance monitoring data gathering functions. This section reviews some of the common error messages that can occur and what should be done about them. It also discusses the Disable Performance Counter function, which is performed automatically to isolate the failing component and prevent it from causing a system-wide failure. If you are unable to gather some performance counters that should be available on a machine, it is usually because the Performance Library associated with those counters has been disabled automatically because of past errors.