Whether you’re just now finding out about these or you’ve been reminded that these exist, I’m sure your asking: “How can I use them?”
Some many years ago, I used the procedures in SQL 2000 to monitor blocked processes. I was onsite at a customer in San Jose, Costa Rica and I figured pictures would help bridge the gap since I didn’t speak Spanish.
The customer was experiencing outages that they could see with blocking. While investigating I found that blocking was directly related to disk latency. More Latency = More Blocking.
I was unaware that this even existed, but it could be very useful in some circumstances.