[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change]

Performance Monitoring

Monitoring is an essential part of server administration. By monitoring a server's performance, you can spot problematic trends as they develop and prevent larger performance problems. Monitoring also helps you decide when to upgrade your hardware and whether upgrades are actually improving your server's performance. While some problems are obvious, others develop over time. If you do not have a baseline against which to judge and compare the performance of your servers, you can experience problems that you might have avoided. This section describes how to use System Monitor and the Performance Logs and Alerts tool, along with other monitoring tools, to monitor server performance.

note Note Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS) utilizes two modes of operation: Standard mode (default) and Dedicated Application Mode. IIS typically scales and performs better while running in Dedicated Application Mode, though results depend on a variety of factors, including the design of your applications. Also note that each mode requires different counters when monitoring performance. The differences are noted in the relevant topics.

This section contains the following topics:

About Performance Monitoring: This topic is a high-level overview of performance monitoring and includes descriptions of response time, resource utilization, and performance bottlenecks.
Tools Used to Monitor Performance: This topic describes a variety of Windows tools used to monitor performance and scalability.
Monitoring Your Web Applications: This topic describes how to monitor and tune applications for improved performance.
Measuring Hardware Performance: This topic describes counters related to memory, processor capacity, and multiprocessor systems. This topic also describes the following concepts and makes recommendations on how to monitor and improve performance accordingly: processor affinity, network capacity, latency, bandwidth, disk optimization, and security.

The Microsoft Servers Web site offers detailed information and case studies on other Microsoft server products designed to increase the performance, scalability, and reliability of your Web presence. These products include: SQL Server, Application Center, BizTalk Server, Commerce Server, Host Integration Server, Windows 2000 Server, Windows Datacenter Server, and Microsoft Exchange.