Professional SQL Server® 2005 Performance Tuning

Chapter 2. Monitoring Server Resources with System Monitor

Understanding how your server is performing can be invaluable when troubleshooting problems and is useful in effective management of your systems such as capacity planning. This chapter covers when to use System Monitor and how to get the most from monitoring to determine how your server is performing. Deciding what data to gather is the first step; interpreting the data is the next step in resolving an issue before putting a fix in place. At the end of this chapter, you should expect to better understand how to:

• Analyze a performance problem

• Proactively monitor server resource usage

• Apply best practices when using System Monitor

Familiarizing yourself with the tools and your system's regular workload means that you're able to differentiate between the usual creaks and groans of your server and an actual performance problem. Performance tuning is a science. Getting to the root cause is a journey that can be long and arduous, but if you're comfortable with the tools and familiar with your environment, it should be an enjoyable and interesting challenge.