We have a distributed test environment and have some firewall challanges, so we cannot use the usual ports to acquire performance counter metrics. Anyone know if it is possible to reconfigure which ports the performance counters can be read from. E.g. configure them to use port 8080 or similar instead of 139/445?
We have a Visual Studio Load Test which needs to read the metrics.
According to Microsoft KB article 832017 monitoring performance counters remotely uses the NetBIOS Session Service protocol on port 139. I doubt that you will be able to map this protocol to another port as it is used by several Windows components.
You could write your own tooling around performance monitoring that uses ports and protocols available to you, but compared to firing up performance monitor and connecting to a remote system it requires much more effort.