In Review

This chapter is devoted to the monitoring tools for SQL Server. I devoted most of this chapter to performance monitoring because it is such a critical area and not adequately covered in Books Online or in other volumes. Many a DBA forgets that the maintenance of the platform and its resources are critical to the health of any server service or DBMS.

Often a server will be upgraded for no reason because bottlenecks were detected but not identified. Throwing in another CPU or two does not always solve the problem, and in many cases does not warrant the stress of the upgrade.