Step 1: Make a list of 5 problems you've faced in the last couple of months that you needed alerting on. If you've got a help desk ticket system, look at the ticket types that occur most frequently and cause the most outage times.
For me as a DBA, that might be:
The strength of your car's headlights, the speed of your reactions, and the power of your brakes determine how fast you can drive safely at night. Likewise, in SQL Server, we need to see down the road before disaster strikes, and react as quickly as possible.
When my Grandpa Ozar wanted to find out if his 10 megabyte 5.25" hard drive was responding fast enough to handle his database loads, he monitored the Perfmon counter Physical Disk: Disk Queue Length. Things have changed since Grandpa's time, though, and now it's time to learn a new performance tuning trick - SQL Server waits.
Database administrators need to know each SQL Server's weakest link so we know where to focus their hardware budgets and time. On any given server, we need to know what the slowest component is, and where it'll pay off to invest hours and dollars. This is performance tuning, and the first place to start is by using Performance Monitor.
