PI Performance Monitor Interface.
The Performance Monitor Interface has been designed
to extract information out of counters
provided by Windows machines. Right out of
the box, Windows Operating Systems will provide
several hundreds of counters giving information
about both hardware and software. For
example, one could look at the CPU usage,
free space on hard drives, memory usage,
network statistics, printer statistics,
and so on. In addition to hardware,
several applications will provide information
about themself. A good example is the PI Sever
which could tell you how many connections are
currently open on, on the server, how many
events are archived per second.
Other applications such as SQL Server,
BackupExec and many others will provide
information about themselves. Also, what
is important to remember is that one instance of the Interface
can monitor more than one Windows machine.
Indeed, the Interface can monitor counters
from local machine or remote machines.
But before to go further, let's take a look at the
notes at the bottom of this page as there are two important
points to remember. The first one is
concerning counters for logical drives on
Windows 2000 machine. This is
not a concern on newer systems as the
counters for logical drives are automatically enabled.
On Windows machine, what you have to do prior
to monitor these counters, you have to run
this command: diskperf - yv
in DOS, and then restart
the machine. Doing this will enable
the counters. A second point is
concerning accessing remote machine.
Because you have to have administrative privileges
to access remote machines, the service
you created for the Interface has to be logged on
as a specific account, an account
that has administrative privileges on the machines you
want to monitor. You may have seen this
window before. This is the default window to look
at counters in Windows systems. You can
access it via Control Panel,
Administrative Tool, and Performance. Let me
open it. Start Menu,
Settings, Control
Panel,
Administrative Tools, and
then Performance.
In this window you could use the plus sign
to add counters to the list.
Let me show you how many counters you could look at.
See, these are counters from
my local machine. You can
choose from a big list of performance objects:
processor; information about
processes themselves. SQL Server
does provide information about itself.
Same thing for the PI Server.
You see Microsoft Outlook.
You could also see memory
network statistics, logical disks
and many others. Let's
choose my network interface.
See, for
one specific performance objects, you have
a list of counters. You could see bytes
received per second, sent per second, total per
second, current band width, and so on. You see,
you have many counters. For every single
counter, you could look at one
instance. As I have more than one network
interface, I could look at bytes total per second
on my regular network interface or
on my wireless network interface.
So, again, this is the default
place, in Windows, to look at Performance Counters.
Now, keep in mind, all the counters,
absolutely all the counters you can find here, can
be monitored and then archived by
the PI Performance Monitor Interface.
What about configuring the Interface now?
Well, in ICU, as this is a
standard Interface, you can simply configure the general
parameters, the PointSource, the
ID Number and the Scan Classes.
In some cases where you are not getting the expected
results from some counters, you could be interested in
going on the PIPerfMon tab and
enabling Debugging. Depending on the level
of debugging you choose, more or less information
will be written to the PIPC.log file.
You could also change the number of threads
the Interface will use to get better performance.
A little bit earlier, I told you that
the service has to be logged on with
a specific user account, an account that
has administrative privileges to access
remote counters. You normally log it
with a user belonging to the
computer itself or the domain. The name of the
domain or the name of the computer, backslash,
user. You can
do that in two different ways. The first way
is via the Windows Services.
From the Control Panel, Administrative
Tools, you then choose Services,
and you can simply right-click on the
name of the service to edit its properties.
And then, the Log-on As field,
which you can find on the Log-on tab,
simply has to be changed from Local
System Account to this account.
Then you type the name of the account, the
password, twice, and you click OK. And, that's done.
The second way is using PI
ICU, our Interface Configuration Utility.
As you can see, on the fourth tab,
Service, you have three fields:
Log On Has, Password, and Confirm
Password. You have to set them
prior to click on Create so the Service will
automatically be created with the user account.
Then three little points to pay attention
to. First, on Windows
XP machines, there's something called
Simple File Sharing. That must be disabled.
Also, users must have
a password, and they also have to have -- well,
as you already know -- administrative privileges on
the remote machine, and the
"Log On As A Service" right, which is a special
permission in Windows. For those of
you who are already network administrators,
you probably know about this right. For other
people, if you need some more information about this
service, just take a look at the notes at the bottom of this page.
See, we say here that the "Log On As
A Service" right can be granted through
User Right Assignments
in local security settings. Let me show
you. Start Menu,
Settings,
Control Panel, Administrative
Tools,
Local Security Policy.
Then, under
Local Policies, you have User Rights
Assignment. A special permission
here is called Log On As A Service.
If you double-click on this item,
you will see a list of users
that are granted this permission. If the user
you want to use to log on your interface as
is not there, you should simply
Add User or Group.
So you can click on this button, add your
user, click OK,
and then, when you are,
when you are back, and either
the service is here or in ICU,
you can use the user to log your
interfaces in.