This KB informs us that Microsoft added much needed performance counters to Windows Server 2012 R2 for monitoring tiered Storage Spaces. You can find more details here. The new perfmon metrics are:
- Avg. Tier Bytes/Transfer
- Tier Transfer Bytes/sec
- Avg. Tier Queue Length
- Avg. Tier sec/Transfer
- Tier Transfers/sec
- Current Tier Queue Length
- Avg. Tier Bytes/Write
- Tier Write Bytes/sec
- Avg. Tier Write Queue Length
- Avg. Tier sec/Write
- Tier Writes/sec
- Avg. Tier Bytes/Read
- Tier Read Bytes/sec
- Avg. Tier Read Queue Length
- Avg. Tier sec/Read
- Tier Reads/sec
Definitely needed! Keep the SOFS/Storage Spaces updates coming, Microsoft. There are still quite a few areas that are lacking, and monitoring is a big one. With SOFS, Microsoft is in a perfect and unique position to offer end-to-end monitoring, so hopefully this will continue beyond Perfmon.
I may be missing something but I deliberately ensured my server was up to date, restarted it and for the life of me can’t find these new performance counters in perfmon.
I’ve even tried
(get-counter -ListSet *).paths | where {$_ -like “*tier*”}
but had no hits. I’ll restart the server again after hours and have another look.
We’re a small shop (4 users writing healthcare software) and don’t have a lot of demands but I’ve just set up a mirrored SSD+HDD set of disks (rather than relying on the supplied LSI RAID controller) and want to know I’m getting the expected performance (I don’t think I am) before moving all of our VMs over to the new server. If I continue to have trouble I’ll dig in deeper and write back with whatever I did to get the counters to appear.
Thanks for the blog 🙂