Professional SQL Server® 2005 Performance Tuning

2.4. Getting Started with System Monitor

System Monitor is provided as part of the operating system to allow system administrators to get visibility of server workload and resource utilization. The tool can be useful for providing data helpful in troubleshooting problems, trend analysis, and system capacity planning.

This section is intended to help familiarize you with the tool, the information it can provide, and how you can present this information natively within System Monitor. The Performance Console Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in includes two key tools for monitoring server performance:

• System Monitor

• Performance Logs and Alerts

The first component, System Monitor (commonly known by the name of the executable perfmon.exe, and generally what is known as Perfmon), is the realtime monitoring tool. Performance Logs and Alerts contains three sub-components: Counter Logs, Trace Logs, and Alerts.

Throughout this chapter Performance Monitor and System Monitor are used interchangeably as terms referring to System Monitor (rather than Performance Console), since these names are more commonly used.

Begin by launching the Performance Console from Administrative Tools (the same tool is known as Reliability and Performance Monitor in Windows Vista), or add the Performance snap-in to MMC. The figures shown in this chapter were created using Reliability and Performance Monitor in Windows Vista, so the interface may differ slightly in appearance, although functionally they're ...