Is there a Windows equivalent of Unix 'CPU steal time'?
- by Steffen Opel
In order to assess performance monitoring accuracy on virtualization platforms, the CPU steal time has become an increasingly relevant metric - see EC2 monitoring: the case of stolen CPU for an instructive summary in the context of Amazon EC2 and IBM's paper on CPU time accounting for a more in-depth technical explanation (including illustrations) of the concept:
Steal time is the percentage of time a virtual CPU waits for a real
CPU while the hypervisor is servicing another virtual processor.
Accordingly, it is exposed in most related Unix/Linux monitoring tools nowadays - see e.g. columns %steal or st in sar or top:
st -- Steal Time
The amount of CPU 'stolen' from this virtual machine by the hypervisor
for other tasks (such as running another virtual machine).
I've been unable to figure out how to capture the same metric on Windows though, is this possible already? (Ideally for the Windows 2008 Server R2 AMIs on EC2 and via a respective Windows Performance Counters of course.)