Perfmon counters are an excellent tool for monitoring and sometimes troubleshooting Microsoft SQL Server. But some counters can get you into trouble, because they don’t mean what many people think. Learn what to look out for in the world of widely-used perfmon counters.
The name of the “SQL Statistics \ Batch Requests/sec” counter is confusing: exactly what is a request? The request is the WHOLE batch. See a demo of this counter in this quick 5 minute video.
Sometimes you need to compare lots of counters at once - for example, counters that report at the database level. This can be frustrating in “Line” view, but the “Report” view in perfmon makes life much simpler.
The problem: by default, the Performance Monitor application in Windows doesn’t remember which counters you like to use.
This can mean a lot of clicking every single time you open perfmon.
Copyright (c) 2025, Catalyze SQL, LLC; all rights reserved. Opinions expressed on this site are solely those of Kendra Little of Catalyze SQL, LLC. Content policy: Short excerpts of blog posts (3 sentences) may be republished, but longer excerpts and artwork cannot be shared without explicit permission.