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Counters missing when machines accessed remotely

Not so long ago, we observed an issue with remotely accessing the PhysicalDisk counters on several machines, more specifically - there were none. 🙂

To be clear - if you opened up the Performance Monitor (perfmon.exe) on the affected machine, you can see all the counters, including the PhysicalDisk counters. But, if you opened up the Performance Monitor on a different machine and tried to access PhysicalDisk counters of the first machine over network, they aren't shown anymore... but others (like CPU and Memory) are still there and can be used!

Counters shown normally on local computer and in local Performance Monitor

The same counters not visible from remote machine's Performance Monitor

So... why? 🙂

At first, we thought that our monitoring software went berserk, but no - the PhysicalDisk counters on a remote machine were missing even we were using the built-in Performance Monitor tool (PhysicalDisk counters weren't shown).

Next - maybe it's something on the network? Of course, network is never the issue, but still... (wasn't an issue here as well, because other counters worked without any issues)

Next, we thought, it's related to the version of Windows accessing from, or the version at the destination - as we found out, too many different versions were impacted to hold that theory, so... no.

One thing we are not sure is if it's caused by some of the "not so recent security patches".

As we found the solution for our issue, what exactly caused it in the first place is not so important right now... Solution is simple - you actually need to run one command to re-register the system performance libraries with WMI (winmgmt /resyncperf) and then reboot the affected machine.

So, the commands you need are:


Counters shown normally from remote computer and in local Performance Monitor


P.S. Don't forget to reboot the affected machine! 🙂