SQL Server PerfMon Counters That Actually Matter, Plus the Complete DMV Toolkit
Windows Performance Monitor exposes hundreds of SQL Server counters. Most are noise. Here are the handful worth an actual dashboard tile, plus every DMV this course has used, in one place.
The PerfMon Counters Worth Watching
| Counter | What a bad value means |
|---|---|
| Page Life Expectancy | Low = buffer pool pressure, pages evicted quickly (Module 1) |
| Batch Requests/sec | Your baseline throughput metric — track trend, not absolute value |
| Compilations/sec vs Batch Requests/sec | High ratio = excessive recompiling, often ad-hoc query bloat (Module 1) |
| Lock Waits/sec | Rising trend = growing blocking problem (Module 5) |
| Full Scans/sec | Rising trend alongside stable workload = missing/degraded indexes (Module 2) |
The Complete DMV Reference From This Course
The Right Habit: One Dashboard, Not Twenty Tools
Query Store, Extended Events, DMVs, and PerfMon aren’t competing tools — they answer different question shapes. PerfMon: is there a trend problem over time? DMVs: what’s the current/historical state right now? Extended Events: capture specific events as they happen. Query Store: how has this specific query’s performance evolved? Combine them per the Evidence-First workflow rather than reaching for just one out of habit.
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Want the full structured course with quizzes and hands-on labs? Check out SQL Server Performance Tuning, coming soon on this site.