Once you have deployed and configured your SQL Server, you can create a performance baseline. This baseline is very important for you for numerous reasons and they are as follows:
- When you start troubleshooting the server, you need to know how your server will behave to something odd
- You can proactively tune the system if you find a weak spot in the baseline
- When you plan to upgrade your server, you know how the load was increasing over time, so you can plan properly
Creating a performance baseline and capturing performance information for your server is hence a very crucial task and should be deployed to each of your servers. There are numerous sources that you can use to collect useful information about your SQL Server and these include the following:
- Windows performance monitor
- SQL Server Dynamic Management Views
- SQL Server extended events...