We are trying to use this perfmon counter as a diagnostic aid to catch issues with a third party interface, but it could be used with PI interfaces. We are checking to see if the point configuration for their interface matches across the four possible servers the interface could be sending from.
I opened a case (00825139) and was given this response by the engineer:
These two numbers are not expected to be the same. PIbufss point count is simply the number of points that it knows about - someone has sent data to these points, maybe far in the past. The numbers that piartool -bfs reports is the number of points that this pibufss happens to own now. Ownership of a point meaning that this pibufss is currently writing to the the snapshot for that point.
The current behavior of that counter renders it basically worthless - to anyone. I am requesting that this counter always reflects what would be reported by piartool -bfs.
