In my previous post, I concluded by saying that my next post would cover Send As permissions in Exchange 2010; however, I am going to slip this one in first.

Recently we discovered that we were not collecting disk performance data from one of the remote servers we manage with Operations Manager 2007.  Disk performance counters are enabled by default on all Windows operation systems after Windows 2000.  As this particular server is running Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server, I initially assumed that the counters were enabled.  I attempted to rebuild the performance counters from an elevated command prompt by running lodctr /R from the C:\WINDOWS\System32 directory.  Still no disk performance counters in Operations Manager 2007.

After a bit of research using my new best friend Bing, I was led to check the following registry key on the remote server:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\PerfDisk\Performance

If present, locate the Disable Performance Counters value in the details pane.  If the data value is 0, the counters are enabled and if the value is 1, the counters are disabled.  In our instance, this value was set to 1 as shown below.

After changing the value, a reboot of the server was necessary for the operating system to reload the registry and pick up the change.  Our Network Operations Center (NOC) rebooted the server during the overnight maintenance period.  The following morning I check the Operations Manager 2007 Console and still had no disk performance counters.  I logged back onto the remote server and attempted to rebuild the performance counters from an elevated command prompt as outlined above.  Back in the Operations Manager Console, there were now ten performance counters available for each logical disk.

The moral of this story – first check the registry for the existence and setting of the key listed above, reboot the server, and then rebuild the performance counters.  Hopefully, this information will save someone else some troubleshooting and research time.