Troubleshoot : Perfmon.exe shows error message “Unable to connect to machine”

Lot of people face this issue which using performance monitor( perfmon.exe) while trying to monitor performance counters from remote machines. Here is the checklist which will help to make sure that you always able to access performance counters from remote location.

Access Permissions

Make sure the windows user who is trying to access performance counters from remote machine is local administrator of that local machine. As following screen shot highlights, just log on to remote machine and make sure the user who will access performance data is part of ‘Administrators’ group on remote machine.

If you have security issue in making user ‘Administrators’ then try to add the users in other highlighted groups. ‘Performance Log Users’ and ‘Performance Monitor Users’. But it is always preferable that user should be part of  ’Administrators’ group.

 

Remote Registry Service

Some times even after having enough access permissions on remote machine you may get an error ‘Unable to connect machine’. Or in case if you are using .net API System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounter to access you will get ‘Network path not found’ (Win32Exception). So to resolve it just make sure that remote registry service is running on remote machine.

I am sure this will help.