There are lots of ways to monitor the performance of a SQL server, but here are a couple tried and true methods that have worked for me.

I’ve often been asked questions regarding monitoring the performance of a SQL server. This may sound like a pretty simple thing but once you start looking at all of the different performance objects you can log for a SQL server, you may feel overwhelmed pretty quickly. Here are a couple of counters that I typically use for SQL server performance monitoring:

SQL Server General Statistics: User Connections – The number of user connections to the SQL Server. This is a good way to trend when the server is used most during the day.

SQL Server: SQL Statistics: Batch Requests/Sec – This is a good indicator of how busy your SQL server is. If this number is over 1000 then you have a pretty busy SQL server.

SQL Server Buffer Manager Objects: Cache Size (pages) – This monitors how much physical RAM is devoted to the data cache of the SQL server. This is measured in pages, so multiply this number by eight to see how much physical RAM is being taken up.

These three performance counters should give you a pretty good start on monitoring your Microsoft SQL Server.

Article written by MyComputerAid.com