I am testing the new Windows module in metricbeat-6.0.0-alpha1 on Windows 7 and Windows 10 machines. I am very excited about this functionality!
The issue/concern I have is if the perfmon counter does not exist on the machine, metricbeat fails to start with the following error.
Exiting: 1 error: initialization failed: failed to add counter (path="\ICA Session(_Server Total)\Latency - Last Recorded"): The specified object was not found on the computer.
For my use case, I would like to run the metricbeat agent on physical and virtual machines. The virtual machines have this counter but the physical machines do not. Ideally, I would like to use the same yml file across all machines to keep the deployment simple. I understand the logic behind failing if the counters don't exist but I would propose that be a warning instead of a fatal error.
Maybe we could add a config option that says to ignore the failure if the counter is missing? I wondering if that should be a per counter option or a per metricset option. WDYT?
cc: @maddin2016
@andrewkroh, that would be a nice feature. I would prefer the per counter option because if you have many counters and you have a spelling mistake in one or two you never get a notice.
For my purposes, enabling it at the higher level would be fine. I would test my yml file w/o the option to identify typos and then enable it on the whole metricset for deployment. That way I would at least get some metrics from machines that were missing a counter for some reason. I can understand why some might want it at the counter level though so, if it is not too much to ask, how about the option to do either?
I added it to our list of things that we would like to have in the module for the GA release. Thanks for the feedback.
