Professional SQL Server® 2005 Performance Tuning

2.9. Using System Monitor Proactively

A baseline is invaluable. Understanding how your systems behave while under normal load will assist when troubleshooting and while making decisions around capacity planning and resource utilization. It can be really useful to authoritatively answer questions around typical CPU utilization, normal memory consumption, and average disk performance. Using System Monitor proactively can help with each of these.

Regularly running System Monitor to obtain system baseline data can be readily used for trend analysis and capacity planning. Server overhead can be minimized by running System Monitor remotely, and reducing sample frequency to between 15 and 30 minutes. Allowing the log to run continuously over 24 hours (or longer) will provide a useful system overview which should be retained for future reference.

Once you've done this, the next time you receive a problem report from a user that indicates a potential performance issue, you'll be in a really strong position to run System Monitor on your production server and alongside display your most recently saved baseline. A comparison will be easy, and while server load won't necessarily be identical, you'll be able to compare averages and very quickly get a feel for general server performance and any likely problem areas.