It’s 9:05 AM and your helpdesk lights up: “The SQL Server is down. Nothing works.”
By 9:07, everyone is staring at you.
The trap: you open SSMS and start digging for blocking queries. But what if the database isn’t the problem at all?
I think my biggest gripe about the list is the challenge of being allowed to get several of these metrics. But it is good, in the face of a “Everything is slow fix it now!” style of request, to look at extrinsic factors before digging into SQL Server, as that’s just following the old joke about the drunken man searching for his keys under the streetlamp, despite not having lost them there, because it’s easier to see that area.