Recently I wrote about how to fix Corrupt of Missing Performance Coutners on a Windows Server. If you read the KB Article mentioned, it may sound complicated. One of the steps is to go through registry and find all services that have performance subkey. This could be very time consuming and tedious.

Also, if you missed, the article does mention you have to make sure you rebuild counters from other programs such as Exchange Server and SQL server among others. It’s not part of rebuild process outlined in the KB.

So, I went digging for gold and found Exctrlst.exe. If you run the exe, it will bring up the UI and displays all registry-based performance counters installed on the system. There is a neat option in the UI. The check box “Performance Counter Enabled” allows you to see if you have any performance counters that are not loaded. The UI is not very helpful in making user aware that you can just click the checkbox if the counters are not loaded and it will load it for you. There are no “OK” or “Apply” buttons and change is instant.

There may be services that does not immediately reflect this and you may have to unload/reload counters but I will let you figure out how to do that. Most of the counters should load immediately and you should be able to report on them using Performance Monitor.

For those who need to see the gold I dug up, follow me.

P.S.: I have read some posts which confirms this will also work with Windows Server 2008. Don’t take it as my word, but you have one more reason to experiment.