How to monitor server performance

[Bad boy Warrior]

Are there any internal tools within WS2003 that allows me to monitor the servers performance? if so please advise.

Thanks

[cluberti]

Perfmon?

[Bad boy Warrior]

Ok thats a good start but im not sure what all the bars mean and how tosay whats good/bad. I dont think this does network performance or am i wrong>?

[fizban2]

depending on what you want to monitor, perfmon or sysmon will do the job and get you some good information, run it from another PC to get a good read of the machine you want to get performance of

[CoffeeFiend]

Perm moninor/counters is pretty much all that's built-in. They're also documented (and I'm sure google can find a lot of valuable information if you try).

But that alone... Just doesn't cut it IMHO. The perf counters are available in several ways (thru WMI, dedicated APIs, etc), and hence can be used by other apps (including some freeware ones).

Personally, I've got a setup using MRTG that logs and graphes things ("real" SNMP stuff, and also perf counters via WMI), a bit like snmpboy (and then some other stuff). Likely, there are other apps that can do similar things (and likely some freeware ones too).