Chapter 4: Monitoring Application Performance with System Monitor

Chapter 4

Monitoring Application Performance with System Monitor

The Microsoft Windows 2000 family of servers provides a graphical performance-monitoring tool called System Monitor, which is a Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in. (It was called Performance Monitor, or Perfmon, in previous versions of Windows NT.) This snap-in assists you with monitoring the performance of your Web applications, database systems, and hardware resources on Windows-based servers. MMC has two parts: System Monitor, for monitoring your system in real time; and Performance Logs and Alerts, for monitoring your system in logging mode.

In this chapter we discuss how to use the MMC snap-in, which resources to monitor, and how to interpret some of the most common system counters. Performance objects and counters specific to the .NET Framework are discussed in Chapter 7, ASP.NET and IIS counters and objects are detailed in Chapter 6, and SQL Server specific counters and objects in Chapter 8. Note that we refer to the Windows 2000 server family in this chapter, not Windows .NET Server, because at the time of this writing, Windows .NET Server is still in beta.