Tools for monitoring performance
SQL Server's toolset is very rich and, when monitoring, we need to know which tool or tools we have to use to address performance issues and how to interpret the results measured by any certain tool. In this section, we will go through all native SQL Server tools that help us monitor the performance of SQL Server.
Activity Monitor
Activity Monitor
is a fast and relatively simple tool incorporated within Management Studio. It could be used for a fast overview of current activities running on the instance. As seen in the following screenshot, Activity Monitor
is accessible from the popup menu called by right-clicking in Object Explorer
at instance level:

The Activity Monitor window
In the preceding image, the Activity Monitor is already opened and divided
into six sections:
Overview
Processes
Resource Waits
Data File I/O
Recent Expensive Queries
Active Expensive Queries
Overview
The Overview
section provides quick information about the current CPU effort consumed by the...