Systems Management Empire MIB › NT System Group › NT Performance Groups › NT System Performance Group

NT System Performance Group

The NT System Performance group provides statistics that let you track the health and performance of the system's Windows operating system.

Class: ntSystemPerf

Performance counters in the System Performance group let you see the following:

• Processor time running idle threads (ntTotalProcessorTime)
• How much time the processors spent in user and privileged modes (ntTotalPrivTime, ntTotalUserTime)
• Number of fixed alignment faults (ntAlignFixups)
• Number of context switches (ntContextSwitches)
• Number of exceptions dispatched (ntExceptionDispatches)
• Amount of kilobytes used for all file system control requests (ntFileCtrlBytes)
• Number of file system control requests (ntFileCtrlOps)
• Number of read and write file system operations (ntFileDataOps)
• Amount of kilobytes and number of file system read operations (ntReadKBytes, ntReadOps)
• Amount of kilobytes and number of file system write operations (ntWriteKBytes, ntWriteOps)
• Number of floating emulations (ntFloatEmuls)
• Number of jobs in the scheduler's run queue (ntRunQLen)
• Number of system calls and interrupts (ntSystemCalls, ntInterrupts)

For example, a heavily loaded system typically has a high level of system activity with many process threads competing for CPU time and jobs queuing up as they wait to run. You can track the level of system activity by monitoring the ntContextSwitches and ntRunQLen MIB objects.

ntContextSwitches counts the number of context switches that have occurred. A context switch occurs each time a thread gives up the CPU and another takes its place. A high rate of context switching indicates a high system load. ntRunQLen indicates whether there is a backup of threads waiting to run.