What can I do when my WMI sensors in PRTG are showing errors? Can you provide trouble shooting steps?
Created on Feb 19, 2010 9:28:24 AM by
Last change on Dec 14, 2010 9:52:14 AM by
Every so often customers using our monitoring tools (e.g. PRTG Network Monitor) report issues when trying to monitor their systems using WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) sensors. In most cases, these issues stem from a malfunctioning WMI configuration/installation. For example, we have noticed that many times when WMI issues arise one (or multiple) WMI components crucial for proper WMI monitoring are missing or have not been implemented properly.
Important! Before going any deeper into troubleshooting, a good knowledge of the principles and functions of WMI is necessary. Please refer to the following Microsoft article for frequently asked questions about WMI:
Please ensure the following:
Please refer to the following articles for further information:
A very good external article for troubleshooting WMI is found here:
Tips against slowness on Vista and Windows 2008 are found here:
If you are monitoring a massive number of hosts with one probe, this here might help:
PRTG offers a few settings for dealing with WMI issues:
The following articles provide guidelines for special scenarios:
If all else fails we've gathered some procedures which might fix the WMI system on affected computers:
Another good article about all things regarding WMI can be found under:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394572.aspx
This reference provides a list of WMI providers, information on the COM API for WMI, WMI queries, WMI log files, WMI security, WMI tools and WMI infrastructure objects and values.
Further articles of interest (providing more detail than the troubleshooting articles above), relating to particular aspects of WMI configuration can be found under :
Created on Feb 19, 2010 9:37:49 AM by
Last change on Mar 9, 2012 12:27:44 PM by
Maybe a little addition.
If you query your WMI from within a powershell on Windows 2008R2, you maybe get a Class not Found error. Remember that PRTG uses the 32-bit powershell as default.
Execute your powershell script in powershell 32-bit, receive the same error? Execute your powershell script in powershell 64-bit, error resolved? Than execute your script in a 64-bit powershell by calling it from a commandline in your 32-bit script.
start.ps1 <- the 32-bit, notice the sysnative folder.... c:\windows\sysnative\windowspowershell\v1.0\powershell.exe -file "C:\Program Files (x86)\PRTG Network Monitor\Custom Sensors\EXE\<script>.ps1"
main.ps1 your working 64-bit WMI script.....
Nice thing to know is that you still can use arguments...
Bye, Peter
Created on May 25, 2011 11:13:08 AM by
Last change on May 25, 2011 3:00:54 PM by
People, hello.
I can't really understand what prevented you from developing something like "WMI proxy" which will run as a service on remote machine and execute all the WMI queries - there won't be any overloads, permission issues, flickering issues and so on...
Created on Jul 19, 2011 8:04:13 AM by
@Vadim Doroginin: Actually we did develop such a service. It's called "Remote Probe" and can be installed on one, or a few, or all your machines in your network. But it's a lot of work to install a software on all machines in a network and in most cases it is not necessary.
A huge majority of PRTG users is using WMI just fine to monitor their networks with hundreds or even thousands of Windows PCs.
And for those who do have problems with WMI there is the option to install Remote Probes.
Created on Jul 21, 2011 10:18:48 AM by
Paessler: please consider making the relevant information below part of the body of your KB article. I hope it helps someone else.
A while back I started closely monitoring the WMI service on the various servers that often false alarm during WMI overload. Most often, the free space check would fail returning a null or zero value instead of the correct value for free disk space. To troubleshoot, I added the PRTG WMI service monitor for the WMI Service itself with a 60 second interval. I also monitored the system and application event logs with 15 minute intervals. It helped to get more specific errors about what was going on with WMI. Most often I'd get one of these errors in succession:
Armed with this new information, I was able to find two Microsoft KB articles that seemed to match the symptoms:
Applying these two hotfixes stopped the false alarms on my Windows 2008 and 2008 R2 servers.
Created on Sep 19, 2011 2:17:48 PM by
Dear Ismael,
great finding, thanks a lot for this!
I've added your solution to our Most common WMI errors article.
Best regards,
- Volker
Created on Sep 19, 2011 4:28:25 PM by
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