Performance Monitoring Tools
In this second post we are diving into what tools you can use to capture the important performance metrics you need to gather for baselining your environment. Be sure to read
part one first.
Performance Monitor
First let’s start with what comes native to Windows Server platform, whether you are on an Azure SQL Virtual Machine or your standard SQL Server instance install on premises you have a native tool, called Performance Monitor (affectionately known to most as PerfMon). This reliable tool allows you to easily monitor performance metrics through a Graphical User Interface (GUI), by selecting performance counters for the operating system as well as installed applications such as SQL Server. It groups these metrics for ease use by category and application specific counters. It is one of the tools best used for collecting those baseline statistics for your system.