Professional SQL Server® 2005 Performance Tuning

2.12. Monitoring Remote Servers

When monitoring any service on any server there's always a trade-off between running the monitoring tool locally versus remotely. There's no right answer that works for every situation, since there are benefits and disadvantages of every monitoring configuration. Importantly, performance data should always be analyzed with awareness of the environment and configuration with which the data was gathered (specifically network configuration/limitations when using remote monitoring). As discussed earlier, running any kind of monitoring tool creates a performance overhead on the computer being monitored. When troubleshooting a specific issue, the use of Performance Monitor is usually confined to a relatively short timeframe before logging is stopped and often the output is copied to another computer for analysis. On most such occasions it would be suitable to run System Monitor on the server being monitored. However, if the purpose of monitoring is capacity planning or trend analysis, a remote server is preferred. This limits the impact of monitoring on the target server to creating some additional network input/output (I/O).

When monitoring SQL Server remotely, it's worth mentioning that Performance Monitor relies on NetBIOS. If there are any firewalls or port filters between the source and target for monitoring, it's possible that monitoring will be problematic. Once the target server has been specified within Performance Monitor, the performance objects ...