jpoh's questions

So I have been provided with a bunch of performance counters that are housed within a particular performance object (i.e. these are not one of the default perf counters that come with Windows) and because I need to access these statistics on a remote machine, I have to use WMI to achieve this.

However, I can't work out which WMI class this particular performance object relates to (I've looked through the list of Win32_PerfRawData_* classes but there isn't anything that looks like it relates to the performance object in question at least by name).

My questions:

1. Can a performance counter exist without a backing WMI class?
2. How do I work out which WMI class I should query to get the perf stats I need?

I'm using WMI to query the current and average disk queue length of remote machines to be able to monitor the load on the hard drive. The query is as follows:

    select CurrentDiskQueueLength, AvgDiskQueueLength, Name 
           from win32_perfformatteddata_perfdisk_physicaldisk

The results that I'm getting returned is confusing; I find that I am getting consistently (much!) higher total (i.e. for Name = _Total) results for average disk queue lengths compared to the current disk queue length. A graph of this is as follows:

where the purple line corresponds to the total average disk queue length and the green line corresponds to the current disk queue length.

And so my question: how is the average disk queue length computed? How can it be so much higher compared to the current disk queue length when I would assume that the average disk queue length is computed by taking several 'current' values in the past and taking the average of those? Does the average value depend on the frequency at which I run this query?

I'm writing a monitoring service that uses WMI to get information from remote machines. Having local admin rights on all these machines is not possible for political reasons.

Is this possible? What permissions/rights does my user require for this?