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Monitoring a Bunch of Servers in Windows Performance Monitor

/ October 3, 2016 — Monitoring

We recently had to monitor a farm of Windows servers with Performance Monitor. True, we could add one counter at a time from the various servers… point, click, wait, pulldown, click, ok, click…. aaarghhh. Burning hot pokers in the brain working on these boxes. Now, it turns out that you can edit the log settings directly with an editor, so you can clone the settings for one server and monitor 10 servers by copying and editing text.

Go into Administrative Tools -> Performance. Click on Counter Logs. Right click in the right pane and select New Log Settings, enter a name, and add the counters you want. Right click on the counter and select Save Settings As. You can then edit this file. This is an example list of counters we use to monitor Terminal Services:

<PARAM NAME="Counter00001.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\Memory\% Committed Bytes In Use">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00002.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\Memory\Available MBytes">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00003.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\Memory\Pages Input/sec">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00004.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\Memory\Pages Output/sec">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00005.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\Memory\Pages/sec">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00006.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\Paging File(_Total)\% Usage">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00007.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\PhysicalDisk(_Total)\% Disk Time">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00008.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\PhysicalDisk(_Total)\Current Disk 
Queue Length">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00009.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\Processor(0)\% Processor Time">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00010.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\System\Processor Queue Length">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00011.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\Terminal Services\Active Sessions">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00012.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\Terminal Services\Inactive Sessions">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00013.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\Terminal Services\Total Sessions">
<PARAM NAME="CounterCount" VALUE="13">

All we have to do to clone this and add new servers is copy the above 12 lines, change the counter numbers, and change the counter count:

<PARAM NAME="Counter00013.Path" VALUE="\\srv-49\Terminal Services\Total Sessions">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00014.Path" VALUE="\\srv-48\Memory\% Committed Bytes In Use">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00015.Path" VALUE="\\srv-48\Memory\Available MBytes">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00016.Path" VALUE="\\srv-48\Memory\Pages Input/sec">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00017.Path" VALUE="\\srv-48\Memory\Pages Output/sec">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00018.Path" VALUE="\\srv-48\Memory\Pages/sec">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00019.Path" VALUE="\\srv-48\Paging File(_Total)\% Usage">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00020.Path" VALUE="\\srv-48\PhysicalDisk(_Total)\% Disk Time">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00021.Path" VALUE="\\srv-48\PhysicalDisk(_Total)\Current Disk 
Queue Length">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00022.Path" VALUE="\\srv-48\Processor(0)\% Processor Time">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00023.Path" VALUE="\\srv-48\System\Processor Queue Length">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00024.Path" VALUE="\\srv-48\Terminal Services\Active Sessions">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00025.Path" VALUE="\\srv-48\Terminal Services\Inactive Sessions">
<PARAM NAME="Counter00026.Path" VALUE="\\srv-48\Terminal Services\Total Sessions">
<PARAM NAME="CounterCount" VALUE="26">

Save the file, and in the right pane, right click, select New Log Settings From, and choose the file you just saved.

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