How-to increase WMI timeout

Owned by Anastasios Thomaidis
Last updated: Dec 11, 2023 by Matthew Hierholzer
1 min read

This article explains how-to increase the Windows Management Instrumentation timeout to prevent Checkmk services from going stale.

LAST TESTED ON CHECKMK 2.0.0P1

Table of Contents

Problem

The Windows Management Instrumentation tends to time out on a regular basis, no matter which version is used or how big the machine is sized. Since WMI is responsible for collecting all performance data within Windows (which can also be viewed with perfmon on the specific machines), this may likely result in Checkmk services going stale, such as "Memory & Pagefile" and "Processor Queue". 

  • The easiest fix: reboot. If you reboot your systems regularly, i.e., once a month due to patching, this problem should occur quite rarely.
  • Another approach is to increase the WMI timeout in the Checkmk yml-configuration file, which has been available since v1.6 (former: ini-file)

Inside the C:\ProgramData\checkmk\agent\log\check_mk.log, you should see an error like this:

2021-08-03 17:15:35.063 [Err  ] Timeout [3] seconds broken  when query WMI

Solution

Please follow this guidance to increase the timeout.

  1. Go to the agent directory C:\ProgramData\checkmk\agent
    .

  2. Open the check_mk.user.yml file and search for the wmi_timeout section. Remove the '#' and select the value.

    global:
  ...
  wmi_timeout: 7 # <- 7 sec, default ist 3
  ...

.

You can modify this file even when you're using the Agent Bakery!

This guidance is working for Checkmk 1.6 and 2.0

With Checkmk 2.1, you can modify this timeout using the Agent Bakery: https://checkmk.com/werk/12328.