Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Fix those silly "106" Performance Counter events on Exchange 2013 servers

You've probably seen them too, lots of errors in the Application log of your Exchange 2013 server from source MSExchange Common and event id 106.

image

Performance counter updating error. Counter name is PowerShell Average Response Time, category name is MSExchangeRemotePowershell. Optional code: 2. Exception: The exception thrown is : System.InvalidOperationException: The requested Performance Counter is not a custom counter, it has to be initialized as ReadOnly.

The issue is caused by an error in the Exchange setup process where a performance counter definition is tried to read from the wrong location.

The good news is that we can fix this very easy. Copy the following script to a text file and save with the .ps1 extension.

Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Setup
$files = Get-ChildItem $exinstall\setup\perf\*.xml
Write-Host "Registering the perfmon counters"
Write-Host
$count = 0;
foreach ($i in $files)
{
   $count++
   $f =  $i.directory, "\", $i.name -join ""
   Write-Host $count $f -BackgroundColor red
   New-PerfCounters -DefinitionFileName $f
}

Run the script from an Exchange management shell.

image

If you run into issues you can manually retry the process for that specific performance counter definition. For instance, to retry the failed counter definition from the screenshot above you can retry the action:

Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Setup
New-PerfCounters -DefinitionFileName "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V15\setup\perf\WorkerTaskFrameworkPerfCounters.xml"

Interesting detail is that Microsoft apparently wrote a KB article about this issue back in 2013 which I failed to pick up. I modified the script to work on servers with Exchange installed in a non-default path. If you prefer to use the original one, don't forget to change the path manually.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for posting this!

Anonymous said...

This was worked great!

Anonymous said...

Perfect! Greate Info.

Michiel said...

Works on Exchange 2016 as well, thanks!

clreply2020 said...

Thank you for this fix. It worked for Exchange 2016 as well. One question, every-time I restart exchange server, I get these errors and have to run the script to reinstall the perflib. Any idea what could be causing that?

Anonymous said...

Here same issue as clreply2020
After a reboot same issue again with exchange 2016.

Any update on this?

RobertSeattle said...

My Application log is quite literally full of these inane errors on my Exchange 2016 server. This workaround appears to no longer work. Come-on Microsoft, make this smarter and allow us to turn this off.

Anonymous said...

I too am getting these in Exchange 2016 CU2. Any updates???

Anonymous said...

Same here, have to run the workaround after each server start

b12blib said...

What is 1 counter fails with the Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.Exchange.Management.PowerShell.Setupcountername.xml command.
Is there another potential thing once could try to force fixing the counter?

Unknown said...

I installed a clean server with Exchange 2016 CU3 in a mailbox role. Also getting error 106 on restart.

Edd said...

I have also done a clean install of Exchange 2016 CU3 and am getting my event log filled with 106 errors. Has anyone a fix for this yet? Thanks Edd

Gregory said...

Cu4 clean install still getting these errors.