Using Get-Counter cmdlet in PowerShell V2, you can get performance counter values. For instance, if you want the current free memory statistics, use this command.

Get-Counter ‘MemoryAvailable MBytes’

If you want to query the counter continously, use below command.

Get-Counter ‘MemoryAvailable MBytes’ -Continous -SampleInterval 5

Here sampleinterval means how frequently you want to query the performance counter. You can need to parse a value in seconds for this.

Looks like cool right? You can do this from command prompt without powershell also, see my previous post.

Happy Learning..,
Sitaram Pamarthi

Sometimes you might see error like below while starting “Counter logs” tasks from perfmon and additionally you will see Event ID 2003 with source “Sysmonlog” in Application Event viewer and Event ID 7024 with source “Service Control Manager” in System event viewer.

The test1 log or alert has not started. Refresh the log or alert list to view current status, or see the application event log for any errors.  Some logs and alerts might require a few minutes to start,  especially if they include many counters or they contain counters to be collected from a remote system that is no longer on the network. For further information see the troubleshooting section in the online help.

If the above mentioned symptoms matches your problem, then it can be fixed by following the below steps.

• Open regedit and navigate to “HKLMMACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesSysmonLogLog Queries” registry key and go to permissions 
• Grant full permissions to “Network Service” and propagate them to child objects.
• Now try to start your counter log job; it should start now without any issues.

Hope this helps you…

Happy Learning…,
Sitaram Pamarthi

Tags: problems with perfmon, unable to start counter logs, Error starting counter logs