Ways to monitor the WINDOWS SERVER 2003 performance.

[kubby]

I want to know what are the best methods of monitoring the performance for an Application (Anti-Virus, SQL, WSUS) server. Both using Windows inbuilt tools and 3rd party tools.
Information on Inbuilt tools will be helpful as there are very little chances of using 3rd party tools.

[ua549]

I use Windows performance logs, MRTG and IIS to monitor my systems from the web.
Many different operating metrics can be selected to monitor.
One can do it on a LAN with Windows Performance Monitor alone.

Link to MRTG. (http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/)

Link to MRTG on my test box. (http://www.ua549.com/mrtg)

[kubby]

Thanks for the reply...I have few questions:

1. If perfmon is run on the same server for which the data has to be collected... does running perfmon affects the performance recorded? I guess it should.

2. Can you please tell me how exactly IIS used for monitoring the performance.

BTW thanks for MRTG.. its really a good application and I think I might be using it.

Thanks again

[ua549]

Any kind of performance monitoring will affect performance since it takes a small bit of CPU and I/O resources. By adjusting sampling rates the effect can be negligible.

I use IIS to serve the sampling statistics in a web page as demonstrated in the link to my test box above. IIS has nothing to do with the actual performance sampling.