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Counter Repository

One place to fix how a counter is named, scaled, formatted and thresholded — set it once and every chart, picker, alert and report that touches the counter follows.

Settings Resources Counter Repository

Counters arrive from many different engines — SNMP, WMI, Linux, sensors — and they arrive as the device names them. A raw counter path is often unhelpful to read, carries no unit, and offers no hint of what a bad value looks like.

The Counter Repository is where you say, once, what a counter means. It stores metadata about counters, not counter data: names, units, formatting and default thresholds. Anything that later displays or alerts on that counter picks the metadata up automatically.

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What It Stores

Each entry describes one counter.

Display counter name
A readable name shown instead of the raw counter name.
Display object name
The same, for the object the counter belongs to.
Description
What the counter actually measures. This is what appears beside the counter when you are choosing one, which is where it earns its keep.
Data units and Display units
The unit the value arrives in, and the unit to show it in. Unit conversion between the two can be left auto-detected, set explicitly, or switched off with no unit.
Data scaling factor
A multiplier applied to the raw value — for turning a device's tenths-of-a-degree or kilobytes into something a reader expects.
Display format and Decimals
How the number is rendered, and to how many places.
Value map
For counters whose numbers are really states — maps each value to a text label, and optionally a color. This is what turns 2 into Degraded on a dashboard.
Default thresholds
The warning and critical levels offered when someone creates a threshold alert on this counter. A default, not an enforcement — the alert can still be set to anything.

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Where the Metadata Shows Up

This is the point of having a repository rather than per-view settings. One entry reaches:

  • the counter picker, which shows your description under the counter name
  • charts and graphical views, which use the units, scaling, decimals and value map
  • the alert editor, which offers the default thresholds when you add a threshold trigger
  • alert messages, which render the value the way you defined it
  • reports

Because this is metadata applied when a value is read rather than when it is stored, changing an entry also changes how existing history is presented. Nothing is rewritten in the trend database; the same stored numbers are simply displayed under the new definition.

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Shipped Entries and Your Own

NetCrunch ships metadata for the counters it knows about. Editing one does not overwrite the shipped definition — your version is kept alongside it, and the original is retained.

That is why the list offers Restore default rather than a plain delete. Restoring drops your version and the shipped definition takes effect again. For a counter you added yourself there is no shipped definition to fall back to, so the entry simply goes.

Use Add new counter for a counter NetCrunch has no metadata for — typically one from a custom SNMP MIB, a script sensor or a calculated counter.

Metadata is keyed by the counter path with any trailing per second dropped, so a counter and its per-second form share one entry. Define the counter once and both forms are covered.

Related

Calculated counters are a different thing: they create new counters from arithmetic on existing ones, rather than describing counters that already exist. See Managing Calculated Performance Counters.

counter metadatacounter repositorycountersdecimalsdefault thresholdsdisplay namemetricsperformancescalingunitsvalue map