Performance Monitoring

Running header: PERFORMANCE MONITORING

Performance Monitoring

Introduction

The task for this week’s assignment is to discuss specific common areas of concern in reporting hard drive, network, and memory issues, explaining what to look for in these areas.

Overview

Regular performance monitoring ensures that administrators always have up-to-date information about how their servers are operating. When administrators have performance data for their systems that cover several activities and loads, they can define a range of measurements that represent normal performance levels under typical operating conditions for each server. This baseline provides a reference point that makes it easier to spot problems when, or before they occur. In addition, when troubleshooting system problems, performance data gives information about the behavior of the various system resources at the time the problem occurs.

Hard Drive Monitoring

There are many factors that need to be monitored to determine the performance of a hard drive system. For the purpose of this paper, I will be focusing on two areas that I feel are important. They are disk space and disk efficiency.

Disk space is important to monitor because some applications may fail to run if they can’t allocate the required space needed to work. Also, low disk space can limit the ability of the paging file to grow as needed, which in turn affects the system’s virtual memory. If the paging file can’t grow then virtual memory is severely limited which could slow down or crash a system.

Using the built-in monitoring utility Performance Monitor (Perfmon.msc), under the category Add Counters/Performance Object/LogicalDisk, there are two counters that can be used to monitor disk space. They are “% Free Space” and “Free Megabytes”. The % Free Space counter displays the percentage of total usable free space on the selected logical drive or drives. This is a much better indication