Osisoft - Mcn health monitor and configuring the performance monitor interface. v1.2

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.