Start-Job of Get-Counter paths from array - powershell

Question

As a follow up to my last question I would like to compile a list of perfmon counters that are spawned and continuously sampled(-Continuous) at 1 second interval (default) with Start-Job, sleep for 60 seconds then run Receive-job to get the past 60-seconds of stats (-Average, -Sum, -Minimum, -Maximum).
The problem I'm having now is the job starts and stays in a "running" state when I use then absolute counter path. If I try to iterate through an array of performance counter strings the job state goes to "Completed".
Here are two code samples that show non-working and working results.
Doesn't work. Job state Completes even though -Continuous is set. No errors are raised.
$jobs=#{}
$counters=#("\Processor(*)\% Processor Time",
"\Network Interface(*)\Bytes Received/sec",
"\Network Interface(*)\Bytes Sent/sec")
foreach ($counterPath in $counters) {
$job=Start-Job {get-counter -Counter "$counterPath" -Continuous | foreach {$_.CounterSamples} }
$jobs[$job.id]=$counterPath
}
Works as expected, but doesn't allow multiple counters to start-job via a loop.
$jobs=#{}
$job=Start-Job {get-counter -Counter "\Processor(*)\% Processor Time" -Continuous | foreach {$_.CounterSamples} }
$jobs[$job.id]=$counter
Resulting Output
PS C:\Users\msnow> $jobs=#{}
[string]$counter="\Processor(*)\% Processor Time"
$job=Start-Job {get-counter -Counter "$counter" -Continuous | foreach {$_.CounterSamples} }
$jobs[$job.id]=$counter
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
PS C:\Users\msnow> $jobs=#{}
$job=Start-Job {get-counter -Counter "\Processor(*)\% Processor Time" -Continuous | foreach {$_.CounterSamples} }
$jobs[$job.id]=$counter
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
PS C:\Users\msnow> Get-Job
Id Name State HasMoreData Location Command
-- ---- ----- ----------- -------- -------
1 Job1 Completed True localhost get-counter -Counter "...
3 Job3 Running True localhost get-counter -Counter "...
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
PS C:\Users\msnow> receive-job -id 3 | measure CookedValue -sum -Average
Count : 11466
Average : 5.20268509822716
Sum : 59653.9873362726
Maximum :
Minimum :
Property : CookedValue

Answer 1

I believe the problem is in the scope of the variable $counter. Start-job runs the scriptblock in other runspace and the variable it is not visible. You need to pass it as -argumentlist .try:
Start-Job {get-counter -Counter "$($args[0])" -Continuous | foreach {$_.CounterSamples} } -ArgumentList $counter
or
Start-Job {param($counter) ; get-counter -Counter "$($counter)" -Continuous | % {$_.CounterSamples} } -ArgumentList $counter