How to read out Windows 2000 and Exchange 2000 performance counters through SNMP.

With the previous version of Windows (NT 4.0) you could read out the performance counters of Exchange 5.5 and NT through SNMP by using the PERFMON provider that was included in the SNMP agent of Windows NT 4.0. 

This PERFMON provider used a DLL called PERFMIB.DLL and a MIB (Management Information Base) file for monitoring the Performance Counters. The MIB file could be generated for the Performance Counters on the machine you wanted to monitor by using the perf2mib command script that can be found in the Windows NT 4.0 Resource Kit.

Windows 2000 does standard not support monitoring Performance Counters through SNMP because the replacement technology WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) is now being used for montoring.

For information on how to monitor Exchange 2000 via WMI:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdn-online/start/features/e2k_cmpts.asp

Even though the PERFMON provider was quite stabile so it was used often.

Below picture shows for instance the HTTP transferred data of a server that is monitored through the PERMON provider.

Nice is that if the NT4.0 script is installed on a Windows 2000 Server running Exchange 2000 Server using the appropriate MIBs for Windows and Exchange you can read out the Performance Counters using SNMP traps and not by using the WMI interface.

 For more information :

 http://snmpboy.rte.microsoft.com

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