What Do You Monitor?

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System monitoring is one of those subjects you can look at from several perspectives, seeing different pieces of the whole from each. Basically, however, system monitoring boils down to looking at the system from two related but separate points of view:

• First, there's the issue of "What's going on in there?" For this, Windows 2000 provides Event Viewer. Event Viewer lets you monitor a whole slew of happenings, known collectively as events, that are stored continually in a set of files called event logs. Events can range from innocuous and expected occurrences, such as logon/logoff activities and print jobs, to serious and unexpected errors, such as driver problems or a disk on which storage space is becoming scarce. With Event Viewer, you can record and monitor significant incidents related to the computer, its security, and its applications.
• Second, there's the issue of how the computer itself is performing. Here, you are concerned not so much with what is happening (that is, with events), as you are with how well the computer is making things happen. If you're a programmer, for example, you might be interested in how quickly and effectively your program is running under Windows 2000. This area of monitoring focuses on matters such as processor time, memory use, disk access, cache effectiveness, and the behavior of threads and processes.

When you need to know how well your computer is functioning, turn to Task Manager, which provides information about a few key indicators of performance and system usage. For more a more comprehensive look, use System Monitor, which allows you to view, chart, record, and analyze system efficiency. System Monitor also lets you monitor another Windows 2000 computer on your network.