20. 03. 2024 Attilio Broglio Unified Monitoring

How to Monitor the TOP N RAM-Using Processes

After developing a custom check for monitoring the most CPU demanding processes on Windows servers, we implemented a similar check for RAM usage. Like I described in that previous post, we built this command via PowerShell. PowerShell provides the cmdlet: Get-Counter that gets performance counter data directly from the performance monitoring instrumentation in the Windows family of operating systems. Filtering the result by \Process(*)\Working Set – Private, we can clean the “CookedValue” and apply some mathematical operations to obtain the percentage of RAM used by a specific process.

Here you can see a code snippet that explain the steps used for obtaining the information:

# By default check top 5 processes
if (-not $number) { $number = 5 }
$DICT = @{}
# Top 5 process Memory Usage (%)
$PROCESSES = (Get-Counter "\Process(*)\Working Set - Private" 2>$null).CounterSamples
$Mem = [math]::Ceiling($(get-wmiobject -class "Win32_ComputerSystem").TotalPhysicalMemory )
for ($i = 0; $i -lt $PROCESSES.Count; $i++) {
    if ($($PROCESSES[$i].CookedValue) -gt 0) {
        $DICT[$PROCESSES[$i].InstanceName] += $([math]::Round($PROCESSES[$i].CookedValue / $Mem * 100, 2));
    }
}
$TOPPROCESSES = ($DICT.GetEnumerator() | Sort-Object { $_.Value } -Descending) | Select-Object -Skip 1 -First $number;
Write-Output "[OK] Top $(if ($number -lt $DICT.Count) {Write-Output $number} else { Write-Output $($DICT.Count-1)}) process(es):";
foreach ($item in $TOPPROCESSES) {
    Write-Host $item.Name " " $item.Value"%";
}
Write-Host -NoNewline " | ";
for ($i = 0; $i -lt $TOPPROCESSES.Count; $i++) {
    Write-Host -NoNewline "$($TOPPROCESSES[$i].Name -replace "\s","_")=$($TOPPROCESSES[$i].Value)%;;;0; "
}

After these transformations we get the desired output:

C:\Users\pb00320\Desktop\check_top_ram_processes.ps1
[OK] Top 5 process(es):
chrome 3.39 %
msedgewebview2 2.97 %
memory compression 2.37 %
searchapp 1.62 %
code 1.32 %
 | chrome=3.39%;;;0; msedgewebview2=2.97%;;;0; memory_compression=2.37%;;;0;;
searchapp=1.62%;;;0; code=1.32%;;;0;

This script doesn’t need any additional packages, can be run as a common PowerShell script and can be easily customized.

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