You should perform system monitoring during development of your system and periodically during production. Before “going live,” look for bottlenecks and gauge your ability to scale to your expected long-term workload.

Once in production, you should create a performance baseline and monitor trends in resource consumption against the performance baseline so that you can predict future bottlenecks and determine when resource limitations might begin to impact performance as your customer base grows. You should not worry about seeing short spikes in utilization or high consumption during processes that are operating at an acceptable performance level.

Note that SQL Server 2008 R2 introduces application and multi-server management, which can help you manage the T24 database environment more efficiently at scale, with visibility into resource utilization for consolidation and improved efficiencies across the application lifecycle. For more information, see SQL Server 2008 R2 - Application and Multi-Server Management.

Below is a table with some of the metrics that your monitoring plan should include:

METRIC PREDICTS
Database File Sizes (including tempdb) Need for expansion of files or storage.
Log File Sizes Need to backup transaction log more often.
Processor/% Processor Time: All Instances Additional processors.
Average Disk Queue Length Storage configuration too slow.
Average Disk sec/transfer May indicate a large amount of disk fragmentation, slow disks, or disk failures. (Should be 10 ms or less.)
Disk Bytes/sec for each LUN Need to spread data across more LUNs.
Paging in Pages/sec Need for additional memory.
Network Interface Bytes Received/sec and Network Interface Bytes Sent/sec Need for increased network capacity or segmentation.

For more information please review the Best Practices for Running TEMENOS T24 on Microsoft SQL Server and Windows Server whitepaper.

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