This article offers tips to troubleshoot issues with Windows performance counters. It explains how to reset FrameFlow caches, verify required services are running, and reload the performance counter library when necessary.
Windows provides performance counters for all kinds of items that are important for monitoring. There are performance counters for CPU usage, drive space, bandwidth, memory usage, and many other things. Performance counters are generally very reliable when compared to other protocols however there are cases when they can be unavailable or corrupted. This article provides tips and techniques for troubleshooting problems with performance counters.
For performance reasons FrameFlow keeps a cache of counter names and internal IDs. If the remote system is upgraded to a new version of Windows or if new performance counters are added when a major application is installed the cached version may no longer be valid. In almost all cases FrameFlow will detect the difference and reset the cache automatically however there are a few cases where it is not possible. To manually reset the cached values simply stop and start the FrameFlow service.
If you are seeing the message "RPC Server is Unavailable" verify that the correct system name and/or IP address has been specified. The "RPC Server is Unavailable" error message is a generic one that Windows generates when it can't contact a remote system. After verifying that the hostname and/or IP address is correct, proceed with the next steps.
On the system being monitored, verify that the "Remote Registry" service is present and running. It is the component that FrameFlow communicates with in order to retrieve performance counters. If the "Remote Registry" service is already running try restarting it. That will flush its caches and is sometimes enough to correct connectivity issues.
Rarely the performance counter subsystem on a Windows system can become corrupted. When this happens you may see that expected counters are not present or all counters might be listed as numbers instead of with their usual names. In these cases, you can force a rebuild by running "lodctr /R" on the system being monitored. The "lodctr" command is a command line tool available in all versions of Windows.