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Misleading Perfmon Counters

Kendra Little describes five Performance Monitor counters whose metrics aren’t quite as straightforward as you’d think:

SQLServer: Locks – Average Wait Time (ms); Lock Wait Time (ms);  Lock Waits/sec

The idea: Alert if you have high lock waits

The problem: These counters update when the lock wait ends, not while it’s ongoing. Let’s say you have a query that’s blocked for five minutes. You’ll only see this in the perf monitor when it becomes un-blocked.

These counters can cause confusion and make you look for blocking queries at the wrong times.

Kendra provides better solutions for each of the five perfmon counters, so read the whole thing.