Windows 2000 Performance Guide

A Performance Monitoring Starter Set

We recognize that with so many Windows 2000 performance objects and counters to choose from, it is easy to be overwhelmed. To help readers who want to get started in Windows 2000 performance monitoring without having to read all the in-depth chapters that follow, we now present a set of recommended objects and counters that you can use to begin collecting performance data at regular intervals for your important Windows 2000 machines, shown in Table 2-1. Of course, we do not want to discourage you from reading the rest of the book; this simple list of counters will certainly not provide enough information to help you understand what is happening inside a Windows 2000 machine experiencing performance problems. Subsequent chapters of this book explain what these and other counters mean in some detail and show how to use them to solve practical performance problems.

We also include a brief discussion of some of the performance counters. The recommended set of counters to monitor include System, Processor, Memory, Cache, Disk, and networking performance counters that are relevant to a wide variety of Windows 2000 server and workstation machines. We also recommend collecting process data for critical applications, along with application-specific objects and counters where appropriate. For example, for a Windows 2000 machine being used as a web server, the Internet Information System Global object provides invaluable performance and tuning information. ...