As we all know Windows System Monitor (also known as Performance Monitor) is a tool that allows you to monitor certain performance measures called counters. System Monitor lets you capture performance snapshots of your server. The tool provides a complete picture of your server performance.

Monitoring your SQL Server and Windows server is not a one-time prospect. You must be ahead of the performance curve.
Monitoring your SQL Server also means monitoring your Windows 2000 server closely because any adverse performance in your server could lead to your SQL Server performance suffering.

Inside System Monitor, you'll find hundreds of counters for both Windows and SQL Server. Out Of these counters, you'll find yourself regularly using only a handful of them. The other counters are still useful, but only for specific types of monitoring, such as database growth.

To use System Monitor, you need administrative access to the SQL Server. Sysadmin rights are not enough to use System Monitor. System Monitor is a separate tool that installs with Windows.

Additional SQL Server counters are installed during the SQL Server installation. You can use System Monitor remotely from your workstation or locally on the SQL Server. In Windows, you can access the tool under the Control Panel | Administrative Tools | Performance.

Caution: 

Sometimes, after installing the SQL Server client, you will not see the SQL Server counters in System Monitor. In that case, you can load the counters manually with the command-line tool lodctr.exe. But you first need to unload the counters using the command:

Unlodctr.exe MSSQLServer.

 
Then to load them again, using the command:

lodctr.exe <SQL Server Path>\BINN\sqlctr.ini.

Tip: Running this command on Command prompt. might not work because of exceeding characters in the file path, so first browse to the specific directory and then run the command.

Thanks,
Sarabpreet Singh