Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Basically, in Windows, there are three tools for monitoring performance:
1.
Resource Monitor
2.
Performance Monitor
3.
Reliability Monitor
Resource Monitor has a Resource View that provides a quick, real-time, graphical view
of hardware usage that includes CPU usage, memory usage, disk I/O usage, and network
usage. You can monitor and examine all the processes that are currently running on the
machine. From there, you can even kill a process that you might suspect to be the cause of a
bottleneck. You might want to replace the usage of Task Manager with Resource Monitor to
accomplish the tasks that you used to perform with Task Manager.
Performance Monitor is another tool that gives us a real-time graphical view of performance
counter data. We can specify required performance counters from hundreds of available
performance counters to trace performance data. The performance data can also be saved to
a log file, which can then be used for performance analysis.
Reliability Monitor provides a graphical report view of how stable the system is, by calculating
a system stability index over a period of time. The calculation of this system stability index
is based on system failures that might have occurred in the system. Any problem or system
failure reduces the system stability index.
All these three tools share a common interface, the Microsoft Management Console (MMC),
where they all can be viewed altogether. Reliability and Performance Monitor combines
functionalities of all these three tools at one place.
In this chapter, we will get familiar with Resource Monitor, and Reliability and Performance
Monitor, and see how we can use these tools to check and monitor the performance of
hardware resources. We will not cover Reliability Monitor in this chapter.
Monitoring of server performance
If you are approached by someone and told that the server hosting the instance of SQL Server
is running and responding very slowly, which tool would you prefer to first open to have a quick
review of server performance?
You may have used Task Manager in the past, to quickly check the health of the server. We
have yet another, similar, but new and powerful tool in our pocket that can be used to quickly
check the health of the server resources. Yes, we are talking about Resource Monitor! As its
name suggests, we can use Resource Monitor to monitor the various resources of the system.
In this recipe, we will have an overview of how we can use Resource Monitor to quickly monitor
hardware resources and server performance.
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