Missing processor/memory counters in the Windows XP Performance Monitor application (perfmon)

Question

Perfmon is a Windows utility that helps the developer to find bottlenecks in his applications, by measuring system counters.

I was reading a perfmon tutorial and from this list of essential counters I have found the following ones on my machine:

1. PhysicalDisk\Bytes/sec_Total
2. Network Interface\Bytes Total/Sec\nic name

But I haven't found the following counters nowhere:

1. Processor\% Processor Time_Total
2. Process\Working Set_Total
3. Memory\Available MBytes

Where do I find them? Note that my Windows is pt-BR (instead of en-US). Where do I find language specific documentation for windows tools like PerfMon?

Answer 1

You might take a look into the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Perflib. On my german XP system that key has two subkeys named '007' for german entries and '009' for english ones. Each key has a MULTI_SZ value named 'Counter' which contains a long list of indexes and the corresponding names. If your system has english and potuguese keys, you might be able to find the names you are looking for by looking for matching indexes.

Answer 2

I suspect this has nothing to do with your specific localized version of Windows. Google for "missing perfmon counters" and you will find lots of people, on all versions of windows, that have encountered similar problems.

The fix is to follow the instructions found in MS KB 300956.

There are lots of other good resources for restoring certain types of missing counters:

• Channel 9 thread on restoring missing .Net or ASP.Net counters. Also good step-by-step for following KB 300956.
• MS KB 227662 shows you how to restore missing SQL performance counters.
• Blog posting by an Exchange MVP on restoring missing Exchange perf counters.

Now if I am misreading your question, and the problem is that you can't read Portuguese to figure out which counters are the equivalent for the English ones you actually want, then I'm afraid I can't help you. Just use Google Translate.

Answer 3

You can enable the disabled counters. Using Registry Editor, change the value under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Service_name\Performance\Disable Performance Counters from 1 for disable to 0 for enable OR delete that 'Disable Performance Counters' key. Reboot and try again. OR if you don't want to mess around with registry download "Performance Monitor" from http://www.hexagora.com/en_dw_davperf.asp and install it. It would automatically enable your CPU performance counter (which would enable all those counters) during installation. This is what I did.