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Assistance Needed: Discrepancies in CPU Usage Analysis between UberAgent and Task Manager

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Taral Shah

Hello,

We have configured UberAgent in our Citrix environment. Our users have been experiencing random spikes in their virtual machines on a periodic basis. UberAgent indicates that CPU usage is high, providing us with averages and highlighting the maximum processes taking place. However, the details provided differ from what we observe on Task Manager and the UberAgent dashboards.

For instance, services like MSsense.exe appear to be consuming more CPU in Task Manager, yet we are unable to find corresponding information in Splunk.

Analyzing the root cause of this problem has proven to be quite challenging. I can provide reference screenshots to accompany this case for further clarity.

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    Julian Krause

    Hi Taral,

    Thanks for reaching out.

    uberAgent calculates CPU usage percentage by measuring the time spent executing in relation to the time passed. This algorithm is used both for CPU usage per process and CPU usage for the entire machine.

    Windows Task Manager shows two different CPU metrics, depending on where you look:

    • % process utility (processes and performance tabs)
    • % processor time (details tab)

    Windows defines a processor’s utility as the amount of work it completes as a percentage of the amount of work it could complete if it were running continually at its nominal performance level and never enabling an enhanced performance mode.

    Since CPUs can speed up individual cores far beyond nominal capacity, the processor utility metric reaches numbers far beyond 100 %. Since the upper limit is not known to the OS, normalization is not possible. Instead, Task Manager caps utility numbers at 100 %, which distorts them significantly.

    In conclusion, there are two algorithms used in a Windows OS. uberAgent uses the traditional one by calculating the processor time in percent.

    I hope this helps.

    Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

    Thanks, Julian

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