Your doctor monitors your heart rate, blood pressure, and weight. You’re a server doctor, and there are vital metrics you should watch about your SQL Servers. Even if your servers are healthy today, learn the ten most important Perfmon metrics you should be tracking so you’ll know if things are getting better or worse. Microsoft Certified Master Brent Ozar will help you along your internship in this 30-minute video:
The links we referenced:
- Our Perfmon Tutorial – how to slice & dice your metrics in Excel.
- Best Practices for Running SQL Server on VMware – more in-depth configuration tweaks for VMware.
- How to Make SQL Queries Run Faster – high disk latency numbers don’t necessarily mean you have a storage problem.
If you liked this video, check out our free upcoming live webcasts now.
Guy May 25, 2012 | 7:00 am
Brent.
May I humbly suggest you invest in a decent ‘semi-professional’ microphone for when you do your webcasts. Some of the ‘YouTube game commentators’ (LevelCapGaming etc) get much better quality vocals on their videos and it is even more important for heavy technical videos.
I know your on the road a lot and would need to carry it about, but I’m sure you can do better than the built-in mic.
(And if you do, get the rest of the team the same bit of kit!)
Brent Ozar May 25, 2012 | 7:02 am
Guy – actually, Jeremiah, Kendra and I all have the Blue Yeti mic. The problem is the WebEx recording system – it’s just not capable of great audio. It’s like hooking up a really good microphone to a bad cell call – it doesn’t help all that much. We haven’t found a good conferencing system that handles 200-400 attendees over VoIP with simultaneous screen sharing and video for affordable pricing (under, say $500/month). If you know of one, I’d love to hear about it. Thanks!
Guy May 25, 2012 | 8:15 am
Maybe not a practical suggestion but I’ll give it a shot… Why could you not record your commentary ‘locally’ on your laptop (second mic and a second stream) and then use a video editor to over-dub with the good quality audio. We only hear your voice for most of the video and you could mix-back any voice feedback from the virtual attendees.
Anyway, thanks for the swift reply and the video.
Brent Ozar May 25, 2012 | 8:21 am
Great question – we could do that if only one of us talked through the entire video, but sometimes the other presenters jump in, especially during the Q&A. It’d be a huge pain for us to dub that all together from multiple tracks. There’s only so far we’ll go in our spare time – we build the presentations, pay for the online delivery, rehearse them, deliver them, encode them, upload them, and give them away for free.
Sean Alexander May 31, 2012 | 2:03 pm
And we appreciate it. You could broadcast underwater in a scuba suit and it would be ok.
Cathal June 22, 2012 | 11:14 am
Nice update on perfmon. Have used your template for a long time.
Jeremy September 24, 2012 | 8:39 am
Brent,
Thanks for the great resource(s) – very helpful and informative. I do have a question – are there any disadvantages to setting the log file format in perfmon to SQL and capturing the counter data straight into a SQL server instance? My thought was that this might allow for comparing sets of counter data collected over time – wondering what your thoughts are on that as you set up things with Excel so thinking there must be a reason you don’t log to SQL directly.
Thanks,
Jeremy
Brent Ozar September 24, 2012 | 12:06 pm
Jeremy – great question. If I’m interacting with a lot of Perfmon data, I just tend to analyze it visually and build charts, and that’s where Excel comes in handy.