For much longer than I care to admit I was struggling to monitor any Windows services using WMI on one of my Windows 2008 Servers. Instead I received the dreaded "Invalid Class" error in the APM info window. This was later confirmed using WBEMTEST. When using WMI Explorer it was clear to see that the "Win32_PerfRawData_PerfProc_Process" class did not exist.
I opened a case with Solarwinds support and was directed to their WMI support document and related online documentation. Unfortunately none of the information provided proved useful in this circumstance.
I spent a several hours googling around and was able to find several others with my issue, but no one had found a solution. With nowhere else to go, I spent the $250.00 and called Microsoft Support. It took a few days, and at least three Microsoft support engineers later that we finally got to the root of the problem. I knew from the very beginning that this was going to be something stupid, but I never realized just how obscure the problem would be, so I decided to save others my pain and post my resolution in hopes that others might find it useful in the future.
We went into registry “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\PerfProc\Performance” In the right hand pane we found that “Disable Performance Counters” was set to 1, which means it was disabled. We used “exctrlst.exe” tool, enabled ‘perfproc’ and rebooted. After Rebooting we were able to run the WMI query (SELECT * from Win32_PerfRawData_PerfProc_Process where NAME <> '_Total') using the WBEMTEST tool built into Windows. After verifying with WBEMTEST I confirmed that APM was properly polling my monitored services properly.
I hope someone else finds this helpful.