Metricbeat 6.0.0 modules.d\windows.yml - missing counter failure to start service

[KRasekhi]

Hi,

If you have a defined perfmon counter in here and it does not exist on the machine the agent fails to start. Is this intentional or a bug?

Example -
2017-12-06T14:21:06-05:00 CRIT Exiting: 1 error: 1 error: initialization failed: failed to add counter (path="\System\Processor Queue Length"): The specified object was not found on the computer.

Thanks!

[ruflin]

I wonder if it is possible that such a counter does not exist when start the beat but would show up later on the machine?

Perhaps @maddin2016 can share some thoughts here?

[KRasekhi]

A couple of concerns that come to mind if this is the case -

1. Having to run multiple configurations for specific counters instead of one configuration that ships the data regardless if the counter is there by leaving the value null.

For example if a machine is brokered through Citrix XENDesktop and has Citrix Reciever installed it will create the ICA Session counter that we would like to capture but we have to use a different configuration. Or if we later decide to broker a machine and install Citrix receiver after the Metricbeat was installed then we have to change the config to add the new counter.

2. The other issue is if a machine is running beats configured to pick up a specific counter but later that counter becomes corrupted and no longer exists then Metricbeat will fail to start.

[ruflin]

I think these are valid points. I wonder what your expected behaviour is if you configured a counter and it does not exist. Do you expect winlogbeat to report this as an error? Could you open an issue on Github with this for further discussions? I think we have a feature request here