Windows performance counters & bandwidth

[Cray]

Hi all !

I actually have a little problem regarding bandwidth monitoring on HP proliant / windows servers :

- I have build templates for each kind of servers (e.g : Proliant DL 360-G5 template, DL-380-G5 template etc.)

- each template contains hardware-specific performance counters related to the servers

Simple

But the fact is, I've realized a few days ago that some recently added servers weren't being monitored properly : the bandwidth monitoring wasn't available, despite the fact the template were set accordingly to server-hardware.

Told to myself, what the hell

After a few investigations, I realized that it was a performance-counter issue.

Here's the explanation (base on a Proliant DL-360 template)

- The standard performance counter item being monitored

perf_counter[\Network Interface(HP NC373i Multifunction Gigabit Server Adapter)\Bytes Received/sec]

- The performance counter item from recently added servers

perf_counter[\Network Interface(HP NC373i Multifunction Gigabit Server Adapter - Trend Micro Common Firewall Miniport)\Bytes Received/sec]

As you can see, and for some obscure reasons, the installed Trend-Micro firewall adds itself to the interface name, being really annoying because my perf-counters are no longer valid (of course)

Reading the manual (page 121), I was glad to see an alternative solution, using the numerical form of the perf-counters, but looking into all the numeric codes, I can't figure how to retrieve the exact match to the literal form of my performance counter.

Example :

[...]
Network Interface
512
Bytes/sec
520
Current Bandwidth
524
Packets Received Unicast/sec
526
Packets Received Non-Unicast/sec
[...]

I can indeed extract the bandwidth information like I did with the literal forms, but how can I identify the NIC I want to monitor ?

Any help appreciated

[jroberson]

Couldn't you just redefine your keys? I have something similar but I use the performance counter in the conf file on the host:

PerfCounter=nic0_in,"\Network Interface(Intel[R] PRO_1000 PL Network Connection - Packet Scheduler Miniport)\Bytes Received/sec",30
PerfCounter=nic0_out,"\Network Interface(Intel[R] PRO_1000 PL Network Connection - Packet Scheduler Miniport)\Bytes Sent/sec",30

This way I can use one template and just change the conf file on each host. All I have to do is check for the keys "nic0_in" and "nic0_out" no matter what server they are from. You could also check out this thread: http://www.zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10842

[Cray]

Hi, and thanks for your answer

I never used alias in the .conf files, but as it sounds like a perfect solution, I'll do it