Hardware Performance Counters
The following table describes the hardware performance counters you should monitor. You can find these counters in Microsoft Windows 2000 System Monitor. Each server in your data center should be monitored with performance counters and the results should be viewed collectively. The counters in the System and Memory objects can be used to monitor capacity.
| Performance object | Counter name | Description |
| Network Segment | Bytes received per second
Bytes sent per second |
If a network card approaches its maximum capacity, another should be added. If this value approaches the capacity of the network, then a higher bandwidth network might be necessary. |
| Inetinfo Instance (in the Process object) | Virtual bytes | Monitor this for memory leaks or size approaching maximum available RAM. This counter measures the virtual memory allocations. |
| Working set | Should be well within the hardware capacity you have available, which means less than the physical RAM. | |
| Memory | Available bytes | Should be greater than 4 MB. |
| Pages per second | Should be less than one page per second. If the system is actually out of memory, this is the biggest indicator of the problem. | |
| Physical Disk | Disk Writes/second
Disk Reads/second |
Combined, these two counters should be well under the maximum capacity for the disk device. |
| % Disk Time | The percentage of elapsed time that the selected disk drive is busy servicing read or write requests. | |
| SQL Server | IO transactions/sec | Indicates how much activity the SQL Server actually performs. |
| Compiles/sec
Recompiles/sec |
Indicates the efficiency of the queries that SQL Server is executing. Reducing this number is key to reducing the CPU load on the SQL Server. | |
| System | Context switches/sec | If this rate is greater than 5,000 context switches per CPU, then another server should be added to horizontally scale the system. |
| %Total Processor | Peak utilization can be 100 percent, but utilization should not be sustained at a level past the capacity of your processor. All of the server elements can be scaled horizontally. | |
| Web | Total connections | The number of active Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections to the server. |
| Get requests/sec | The number of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) requests that are received at the server. This is the primary indicator of traffic to a Web site. | |
| Non-anonymous users per second | Tracks the number of authenticated user requests at a site. | |
| Active Server Pages | Requests per second | Rate that Active Server Pages (ASP) are processing requests. Includes both successful and failed requests. |
| Requests executing | The average number of requests running at a time during the sample period. Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 has many threads that can simultaneously process requests. | |
| Request wait time | Should be very close to zero (less than 100 milliseconds) because this is the amount of time a request sits in the queue before it begins processing. You do not want users to experience long wait times to process their checkout transactions. | |
| Requests queued | There should not be a significant queue except at peak periods. |
Bytes received per second
Compare the Bytes received per second counter to the total bandwidth of your network adapter card to determine whether your network connection is creating a bottleneck. To allow room for spikes in traffic, you should usually use no more than 50 percent of capacity. If this number is very close to the capacity of the connection, and processor and memory use are moderate, then the connection might be a problem.
Requests executing
If the number for the Requests executing counter is always greater than one (1), there could be a problem in an ASP page or object that is causing a request to hang. If this number is never greater than one, even during peak periods, you might have accidentally left ASP bugging on in your site.