Professional SQL Server® 2005 Performance Tuning

2.14. My System Monitor Counters Are Missing — What Should I Do?

There could be a number of causes of missing performance counters. This is a common situation. Specifically on clustered servers, many counters are shared and can be problematic if counters have been updated by a hotfix or service pack, and the instance hasn't subsequently failed-over or has experienced errors during a fail-over.

There's a Windows Resource Kit command line utility called CTRLIST.EXE that reports on all objects and counters loaded on a system. The Windows Resource Kit can be downloaded from the Microsoft website. Once you've installed the Resource Kit, the most useful method is usually to pipe the output to a text file (rather than reading in a command prompt window). You can use the following command to pipe the counter list to a text file:

CTRLIST >c:\temp\counters.txt

A second alternative to the command line Resource Kit utility is a newer, GUI version. The GUI version is very similar, and allows you to enumerate loaded counters from remote servers too (assuming security criteria have been satisfied). The GUI version looks like Figure 2-5.

The main purpose for using either the command line utility or the GUI tool to expose the loaded counters is to determine the specifics of the DLLs related to each counter. In a situation where you experience a problem with a counter that is either missing or misbehaving, you'll need to know the DLL name and location.

Once you've identified an object or counter ...