Performance monitoring – Windows server monitoring

I have been doing some research on what system monitoring is useful during performance testing.

I have concentrated on a minimum useful set of information needed to verify that no bottlenecks occur when using a performance testing tool. Even this minimal set should be useful though to enable a rough prediction of the maximum load that could be supported by the system under test.

There’s a wealth of information available on this subject. Two sites I found particularly useful were these:
http://www.sql-server-performance.com/tips_performance.asp http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/HealthCheck/

One subject on which there seemed to be a range of opinions was whether it is best to set up monitoring remotely or locally. If you set up remotely there will be some network traffic, but if you set up locally there is the overhead of running perfmon itself. Do you think it is significant either way – if so, in what situations? Perhaps this is only an issue if you are already close to resource utilization limits.

One thing which is probably always true is that it’s best to be selective and only collect the performance counters you need. This document is my attempt to propose a subset which will nearly always be useful. Take a look and let me know what you think. Is there anything obviously missing? Is it too comprehensive?