Windows Performance Monitor Counters List

By: Ben Snaidero

Overview

Now that we understand how to use Performance Monitor let's take a look at some of the counters that we should be using to monitor the health of our servers and databases.  I like to break the counters down into two distinct categories when it comes to monitoring the health of a system:

• OS/Server counters
• Database/Instance counters

Breaking the counters up this way can usually help to narrow down the root cause of an issue faster.  For example, you could be experiencing a slow response from the queries in your database but there could in fact be some other system related issue with disks or CPU that is actually causing the poor performance.  In the rest of this section, we will look at the counters that are available in each of these categories and for each category answer the following questions.

• Which counters should you collect?
• What do the counters mean?
• What are good and bad values?
• What should you do when you see "X" value?

Additional Information

• Perfmon Counters to Identify SQL Server Disk Bottlenecks
• SQLRx Top PerfMon Counters For Analyzing SQL Server Performance Issues
• SQL Server Database Specific Performance Counters
• System Monitor Perfmon Counters for SQL Server
• Correlating Performance Monitor and SQL Server Profiler Data