System Monitor Scenarios

When monitoring Microsoft® SQL Server™ and the operating system to investigate performance-related issues, there are three main areas on which to concentrate your initial efforts:

• Disk activity.
  
  
• Processor utilization.
  
  
• Memory usage.

It can be useful to monitor Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0 or Microsoft Windows® 2000 and SQL Server counters at the same time to determine any correlation between the performance of SQL Server and Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000. For example, monitoring the Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 disk I/O counters and the SQL Server Buffer Manager counters at the same time can show how the whole system is behaving.

Monitoring a computer using System Monitor (Performance Monitor in Windows NT 4.0) can slightly impact the performance of the computer. Therefore, either log the System Monitor data to another disk (or computer) so that it reduces the effect on the computer being monitored, or run System Monitor remotely. Monitor only the counters in which you are interested. Monitoring too many counters adds overhead to the monitoring process and will impact the computer being monitored, possibly affecting the results.