IntroductionThis week's assignment task is to discuss specific common areas of concern when it comes to reporting hard drive, network, and memory problems, explaining what what to look for in these areas.OverviewRegular performance monitoring ensures that administrators always have up-to-date information on how their servers are performing. When administrators have performance data for their systems spanning multiple activities and loads, they can define a range of metrics that represent normal performance levels under typical operating conditions for each server. This benchmark provides a reference point that makes it easier to detect problems when or before they occur. Additionally, when troubleshooting system problems, performance data provides information about the behavior of different system resources at the time the problem occurs. Hard Drive Monitoring Many factors must be monitored to determine the performance of a hard drive system. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on two areas that I think are important. These are disk space and disk efficiency. It is important to monitor disk space because some applications may not run if they cannot allocate the space required to function. Additionally, low disk space can limit the paging file's ability to grow as needed, which in turn affects the system's virtual memory. If the paging file cannot grow, virtual memory is severely limited, which could slow down or crash a system. Using the built-in Performance Monitor monitoring utility (Perfmon.msc), in the Add Counters/Performance Object/Logical Disk category, there are two counters that can be used to monitor disk space. These are “% Free Space” and “Free Megabytes”. The Free Space % counter displays the percentage of total usable free space on the selected logical drive(s). This is a much better indication of free space than right-clicking the drive and viewing its properties. The Free Megabytes meter provides essentially the same type of information, but in a different format. It displays available free space in megabytes instead of percentages. If after running these counters it is determined that space is low, the administrator should try running "Disk Cleanup" from Performance Monitor, compress the hard drive if possible, or move some files to another disk drive. Monitoring disk efficiency is a bit more important. It's more complicated than monitoring free space, but it's necessary to ensure that disk drives are operating at peak performance. A few steps should be followed before monitoring disk efficiency.