Monitoring with Windows NT Performance Monitor

Windows NT Performance Monitor is a graphical tool in Microsoft® Windows NT® for measuring the performance of your own computer or other computers on a network. For each computer, you can view the behavior of objects, such as processors, memory, cache, threads, and processes. Each of these objects has an associated set of counters that measure device usage, queue lengths, delays, and other indicators of throughput and internal congestion.

Windows NT Performance Monitor provides charting, alerting, and reporting capabilities that reflect both current activity and ongoing logging. You can open, browse, and chart log files later as if they reflected current activity.

SQL Server provides its own objects and performance counters that can be viewed using Windows NT Performance Monitor. When Microsoft SQL Server™ is installed, a Performance Monitor icon is installed in the SQL Server program group.

Windows NT Performance Monitor makes it possible to obtain up-to-the-second SQL Server activity and performance statistics. With this graphical tool, you can:

• View data simultaneously from any number of computers.
• View and change charts to reflect current activity, and show counter values that are updated at a user-defined frequency.
• Export data from charts, logs, alert logs, and reports to spreadsheet or database applications for further manipulation and printing.
• Add system alerts that list an event in the alert log and can notify you by reverting to the Alert view or issuing a network alert.
• Run a predefined application the first time or every time a counter value goes over or under a user-defined value.
• Create log files that contain data about various objects from different computers.
• Append to one file selected sections from other existing log files to form a long-term archive.
• View current-activity reports, or create reports from existing log files.
• Save individual chart, alert, log, or report settings, or the entire workspace setup for reuse when needed.

For information about Windows NT objects and counters, see your Windows NT documentation.