Every server, database, storage appliance and network encounter some sort of performance issues. It is a major part of our job as database administrators to properly monitor and fix those performance issues whether it is in your traditional on premises environment or in the cloud. This article will cover ways monitoring performance and how to establish a baseline. We will go over several important performance metrics every database administrator should know and how to gather and interpret those metrics through several different options within SQL Server and your Windows operating system.
Now which tool you use to accumulate these metrics depends on what problem you are trying to solve. The key is to try and gather the best metrics at the least cost. Cost will encompass both the overhead needed to collect the information as well as the time needed to analyze the date. Both of these play an important role. In part one we will look at performance metrics you should become familiar with, in part two we will take a look at performance tools available to you to capture these metrics.