Dashboards for SQL Server Monitoring

A SQL Server monitoring dashboard gathers the database’s key performance counters — throughput, memory, disk, and blocking — into one view, so slowdowns get diagnosed instead of guessed at. These are the metrics worth tracking on it.

Top 8 SQL server monitoring metrics

• Batch requests — batches executed per second, the standard measure of how much work the server is doing.
• SQL compilations — how often queries are compiled rather than reused from cache; high rates burn CPU on planning instead of execution.
• Buffer cache hit ratio — the share of page reads served from memory instead of disk, a core memory-health indicator.
• Page life expectancy — how long pages stay in the buffer pool; a falling number means memory pressure.
• Disk usage — space consumed by data and log files, tracked against capacity before growth becomes an outage.
• Processes blocked — sessions waiting on locks held by others, the direct signal of contention users feel as hangs.
• Disk read/write — I/O throughput and latency on the storage subsystem, a frequent root cause of slow queries.
• CPU usage — processor consumption on the host, to distinguish an overloaded server from an inefficient query.