About Site Monitoring
You can monitor Commerce Server sites using Microsoft Windows 2000 System Monitor, Performance Logs and Alerts, and other similar tools to predict where bottlenecks are going to occur in your system. (A bottleneck is hardware or software that is operating at maximum capacity.)
When you monitor a system running under Windows 2000 Server, you monitor the behavior of its objects. Windows 2000 uses objects to identify and manipulate system resources, and contains objects that represent individual processes, sections of shared memory, and physical devices.
The Windows 2000 Performance tool is composed of two parts: System Monitor and Performance Logs and Alerts. System Monitor collects data on object activity, object demand, and the amount of space used by the objects. System Monitor also groups counters by object type. A unique set of counters exists for the process, memory, cache, hard disk, and other object types that produce statistical information.
Commerce Server provides more than 200 extensible counters as tools for monitoring. Extensible counters are performance monitor counters that come with applications other than Windows 2000 or that you can build yourself with information from the Windows 2000 Software Developer Kit (SDK).
To optimize site performance, you must know exactly which counters your system is using, what exactly is being measured, and how the measurement is determined. This information is particularly important when you receive unexpected data or inconsistent results. For more information about monitoring configurations, see "Setting Up Your Monitoring Configuration" in Windows 2000 Server Help.
See Also
Commerce Server Performance Counters