Carrying on my series of posts on SQL Server and Disk IO it’s time to cover the old stalwart that is perfmon (referred to in Windows as Performance Monitor) which I know anyone who has delved into any Windows performance issue will have some familiarity with, so I’m not going to cover what it is or how to use it.
The principal reason for this post is to add my own experiences of using perfmon to turn it into a sql performance monitor to track down issues and monitor SQL Server performance.
Many aspects of a database system’s configuration will affect the performance of queries running on that DBMS. However, there is one single component that has the greatest impact on DBMS performance, and that, of course, is disk (IO) access.
It’s a broad topic and all aspects of it are pretty well covered in various blogs and technical articles, but there’s not much out there that gathers it all together. The intention of this series of posts is to try consolidate some of this information and focus in on some of the functions and procedures that can be used to monitor, troubleshoot and configure SQL Server disk configuration and most, importantly, disk performance.