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User Guide

Add metrics using Windows Performance Monitor

24.1.0
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Add metrics using Windows Performance Monitor

Begin by opening the the Performance Monitor snap-in by searching for “perfmon” from your start search menu.

Now drill down to the performance monitor itself as seen below:

Press the green “+” button to see a list of all the performance metrics you can monitor with this program.

Here you will need to find the metric that you would like to monitor. For this example, we will select the “Fragmentation Failures” from the “IPv4” drop-down. Take careful note of the name of the metric and the category it is in.

Activating your metrics

Once your metrics are confirmed to be running in Perfmon, you'll need to tell the FortiMonitor agent to monitor them. There are two ways to do this, with Option #1 being the easiest and newest.

Option 1: Activating your metrics via the Control Panel

Under settings, go to Perfmon Metrics. You'll see a table that may be empty if you've never configured a custom Perfmon metric or one that will have rows if you have.

For each Perfmon metrics you'd like to add, you must enter at least the Perfmon Counter name and the Metric name. For example, to add monitoring for Requests Queued in ASP .NET, you would add the following record:

  • Perfmon Counter

  • Metric

  • Unit

  • ASP .NET

  • Requests Queued

  • requests

You can find all of these from the Perfmon tool itself as described in the first portion of this page.

After you hit save, you'll need to restart each Windows agent that you'd like to have picked up these metrics. As well, you'll need to add the monitoring for these metrics on their respective instances within the FortiMonitor control panel. You can learn more about that here.

Option 2: Activating your metrics via the agent config file

Now that you have found the exact syntax of the metric we would like to monitor, it is time to add this metric to your agent config file. Open up the C:\Program File\PanoptaAgent\Agent.config file in a basic text editor. Under <plugin name=”PerfMon”> you can add a new field for your chosen metric. As seen below we added the “Fragmentation Failures” metric under the “IPv4” category as we discussed above.

Both the “Category” and the “Label” field must exactly match the metric you selected in the Performance Monitor. You can fill out the “unit” field as you wish, it will show up in the FortiMonitor control panel alongside your metric for reference.

You can add as many metrics in this fashion as you wish. To complete these configuration changes, you will need to restart your FortiMonitor Agent service (using the services program). After a few minutes, your machine will sync with FortiMonitor’s servers and you should be able to add this new resource like you would add any other. If you do not know how to add an Agent resource then please see this article.

If you plan on adding this set of new metrics to more than one of your Windows Agents, please contact support! We can add a base PerfMon template to your account to expedite this process and make adding these checks easy! Once we set up the template for you, you can run a metadata refresh and the new metrics will be available to add on all your instances/servers.

Troubleshooting:
If these are added incorrectly you may see some issues in the agent log that look like:

Performance Counter \\IPv4\\Fragmentation Failures does not exist

Category does not exist.

Add metrics using Windows Performance Monitor

Begin by opening the the Performance Monitor snap-in by searching for “perfmon” from your start search menu.

Now drill down to the performance monitor itself as seen below:

Press the green “+” button to see a list of all the performance metrics you can monitor with this program.

Here you will need to find the metric that you would like to monitor. For this example, we will select the “Fragmentation Failures” from the “IPv4” drop-down. Take careful note of the name of the metric and the category it is in.

Activating your metrics

Once your metrics are confirmed to be running in Perfmon, you'll need to tell the FortiMonitor agent to monitor them. There are two ways to do this, with Option #1 being the easiest and newest.

Option 1: Activating your metrics via the Control Panel

Under settings, go to Perfmon Metrics. You'll see a table that may be empty if you've never configured a custom Perfmon metric or one that will have rows if you have.

For each Perfmon metrics you'd like to add, you must enter at least the Perfmon Counter name and the Metric name. For example, to add monitoring for Requests Queued in ASP .NET, you would add the following record:

  • Perfmon Counter

  • Metric

  • Unit

  • ASP .NET

  • Requests Queued

  • requests

You can find all of these from the Perfmon tool itself as described in the first portion of this page.

After you hit save, you'll need to restart each Windows agent that you'd like to have picked up these metrics. As well, you'll need to add the monitoring for these metrics on their respective instances within the FortiMonitor control panel. You can learn more about that here.

Option 2: Activating your metrics via the agent config file

Now that you have found the exact syntax of the metric we would like to monitor, it is time to add this metric to your agent config file. Open up the C:\Program File\PanoptaAgent\Agent.config file in a basic text editor. Under <plugin name=”PerfMon”> you can add a new field for your chosen metric. As seen below we added the “Fragmentation Failures” metric under the “IPv4” category as we discussed above.

Both the “Category” and the “Label” field must exactly match the metric you selected in the Performance Monitor. You can fill out the “unit” field as you wish, it will show up in the FortiMonitor control panel alongside your metric for reference.

You can add as many metrics in this fashion as you wish. To complete these configuration changes, you will need to restart your FortiMonitor Agent service (using the services program). After a few minutes, your machine will sync with FortiMonitor’s servers and you should be able to add this new resource like you would add any other. If you do not know how to add an Agent resource then please see this article.

If you plan on adding this set of new metrics to more than one of your Windows Agents, please contact support! We can add a base PerfMon template to your account to expedite this process and make adding these checks easy! Once we set up the template for you, you can run a metadata refresh and the new metrics will be available to add on all your instances/servers.

Troubleshooting:
If these are added incorrectly you may see some issues in the agent log that look like:

Performance Counter \\IPv4\\Fragmentation Failures does not exist

Category does not exist.