“What counters are important when troubleshooting SQL Server with Windows’ Perfmon (Performance Monitor)?”
As a database administrator architect, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten that question from Windows administrators and new database administrators, and it’s a pretty daunting question to answer. When a SQL instance is installed on a server, there may be more than a thousand new performance counters added to Perfmon and to the Performance Monitor section of the Reliability and Performance Monitor in Windows 2008, so where does one start?