Retrieve Performance Counter's "Explain Text"

Question

How can I get a Performance counter's Explain Text's string value thru Powershell.

I thought it would be a property of a counter

Get-Counter -Counter "\Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time"|gm

(Get-Counter '\logicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk Queue Length').countersamples|gm

But it isn't. I found Lodctr /q to query the counters and this. However, I can't find exactly how to get the string value.

Answer 1

If you are ok with calling .net framework objects you have access to all the methods provided by PerformanceCounterCategory.

The following should help you get started:

$categoryName = "Processor"
$categoryInstance = "_Total"
$counterName = "% Processor Time"

# Call the static method to get the Help for the category
$categoryHelp = [System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterCategory]::GetCategories() | ?{$_.CategoryName -like $categoryName} | select -expandproperty  CategoryHelp

# Create an instance so that GetCounters() can be called
$pcc = new-object System.Diagnostics.PerformanceCounterCategory($categoryName)
$counterHelp = $pcc.GetCounters($categoryInstance) | ?{$_.CounterName -like $counterName} | select -expandproperty CounterHelp

$categoryHelp 
$counterHelp