Performance counters go missing

Question

My problem is that some of the performance counter category seems to go missing sometimes, and I don't understand why.

The code below will throw an exception, like this:

Failed to lookup Performance Category

Error Msg: Category does not exist. CategoryName: HP EVA Physical Disk
Group Category list on target:
ServiceModelService 4.0.
bla bla

Print out contains a long list of performance counters, but not the one I'm after. If I look in perfmon.exe I can find the missing category once.

I'm using the following code to find the different counters inside a category.

public static string[] GetPerformanceCategory(string CategoryName)
{
    //Console.WriteLine("CategoryName to Search for: " + CategoryName);
    if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(CategoryName))
        throw new NullReferenceException("CategoryName is empty");

    try
    {
        PerformanceCounterCategory perfCat = new PerformanceCounterCategory(CategoryName);

        string[] catInstances = perfCat.GetInstanceNames();
        return catInstances;
    }
    catch(Exception Ex)
    {
        StringBuilder ErrorMsg = new StringBuilder();
        ErrorMsg.AppendLine("Failed to lookup Preformance Category");
        ErrorMsg.AppendLine("Error Msg: " + Ex.Message);
        ErrorMsg.AppendLine("CategoryName: " + CategoryName);
        ErrorMsg.AppendLine("Category list on target:");

        StringBuilder CatList = new StringBuilder();
        var categories = PerformanceCounterCategory.GetCategories();
        foreach (var Cat in categories)
            CatList.AppendLine(Cat.CategoryName);                

        ErrorMsg.AppendLine(CatList.ToString());

        Logger.WriteToLog(ErrorMsg.ToString(), EventLogEntryType.Error);
        return null;
    }      
}

The question boils down to, is there some "magic" that can make performance counters disappear? Or perhaps I need to do something specific?

Sounds like CategoryName is being set to "HP EVA Physical Disk \nGroup ". Is that correct? — lc.
Yes. Thats what i want. But off course no \n ? Was that a copy past error from you? — EKS
Sorry I couldn't get the carriage return in the comment. I meant it looks like there's a newline between "Disk" and "Group", if you look at the exception message it looks like there's a newline there. Either way you say it's not showing up in the list, so I guess it doesn't matter... — lc.
Could it be something to do with permissions? I know perfmon runs as Administrator. — lc.
I have also tried loggin in the application as Domain administrator . — EKS

Julien Julien · Accepted Answer · 2013-12-11T10:27:24

I had exactly the same issue, and this is how I fix it:

Server architecture (x86 or x64) and .net (c#) build target must be the same, otherwise your code is unable to access all the performace counters (only a subset of performance counters is available if your build target and server differs).

So in Visual Studio, right-click on your project (in solution explorer), then select "Properties", then go to "Build" and select x64 as platform target (if your server is in x64, otherwise select x86).

Performance counters go missing

2 Answers