Chapter Summary

When working in a Windows Server 2003 environment, it is important that you have a thorough understanding of the performance characteristics of your servers.

Windows Server 2003 provides two tools that provide real-time views of server performance: Task Manager and System Monitor. Whereas Task Manager is useful for a quick and dirty look at system performance for instant troubleshooting, System Monitor provides access to far more counters to provide a more through view of system performance.

System Monitor is part of the Performance console. The other monitoring tool in the Performance console is Performance Logs and Alerts. The Performance Logs and Alerts tool allows you to monitor performance over a period of time and save the results to log files that can be read by System Monitor or other third-party tools.

The Performance Logs and Alerts tool also allows you to send an alert when a preset performance-related trigger is reached.

Key Terms

• Counters

• Instance

• Event ID

• Bottleneck

• Trigger

• System Monitor