Troubleshooting using Windows tools

The following sections describe Microsoft Windows tools that can be used to troubleshoot Windows Agents:

PerfMon

PerfMon (perfmon.exe) is a performance monitoring tool shipped with Windows operating systems. It uses direct performance registry access to gather performance counters. Performance counters exposed by WMI high performance providers can be seen in Perfmon by running the Perfmon tool. This tool is very useful for debugging data collection issues. For example, if the Data Collection Status report has shown that the Collector failed to collect a metric group, you can check to see if the metric group shows any data in PerfMon.

If you think that there is an issue with a metric group, you can log the metric in PerfMon and provide the log file, along with the history UDR data, to the BMC support team.

Exctrlst

Exctrlst (exctrlst.exe) is a tool from the Windows Resource Kit. It uses direct performance registry access to display the names and locations of the dynamic link libraries (DLLs) that support performance counters. If a metric group does not show up in PerfMon, you can run this tool to see if the DLL responsible for the metric group is disabled or does not exist. If it is disabled, you can enable it and restart Perform Agent and the data collection request to see if the issue is fixed. If the DLL is not there, it means the service or application that provides the DLL is not installed on the computer.

Event Viewer

Event Viewer is event monitoring tool shipped with Windows operating systems. It maintains logs about program, security, and system events on your computer. If there is an issue collecting a metric group, you can find useful information in the Application log. Look for events where the source is identified as perflib and see if any event identifies a critical failure.

 

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