The WMI Performance Adapter (wmiApSrv) service provides performance library information from WMI high-performance providers. Applications and services can provide performance counters in two ways: they can write a WMI high-performance provider or write a performance library. Consumers of high-performance data also have two ways to request performance data: through WMI or through the Performance Data Helper (PDH) APIs. There are mechanisms that are in place to enable the two models to interact, so that clients that access counters through each model can still detect the counters provided by the other model. The reverse adapter is one of those mechanisms.

The WMI Performance Adapter service transforms performance counters that are supplied by WMI high-performance providers into counters that can be consumed by PDH through the Reverse Adapter Performance Library. This approach provides PDH clients, such as Sysmon, with the ability to consume performance counters from any WMI high-performance providers on the computer.

If the WMI Performance Adapter service stops, WMI performance counters are unavailable.

This service is installed by default and its startup type is Manual.

When the WMI Performance Adapter service is started in its default configuration, it logs on by using the Local System account.

This service is not dependent on any other system service, nor is any service dependent on it