IntroductionThe task of this week's assignment is to discuss specific common areas of concern in reporting hard drive, network, and memory problems, explaining what to look for in these areas.OverviewMonitoring Regular performance ensures that administrators always have up-to-date information on how their servers are performing. When administrators have data on the performance of their systems covering different tasks and loads, they can define a range of measurements that represent normal performance levels under typical operating conditions for each server. This baseline provides a point of reference that makes it easier to spot problems when or before they occur. Additionally, when troubleshooting your system, performance data provides information about the behavior of various system resources at the time the problem occurs. Hard Drive Monitoring There are many factors that need to 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. They are disk space and disk efficiency. Disk space is important to monitor because some applications may not work if they fail to allocate the space needed to function. Additionally, insufficient 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 may slow down or crash your system. Using the built-in monitoring utility Performance Monitor (Perfmon.msc), in the Add Counters/Performance Object/Logical Disk category, there are two counters that can be used to monitor disk space. They are "% Free Space" and "Free Megabytes". The Free Space % counter displays the percentage of total usable free space on the selected logical drive or drives. This is a much better indication of free space than right-clicking the drive and viewing its properties. The Free Megabyte Counter provides basically the same type of information, but in a different format. Displays available free space in megabytes rather than as a percentage. If after running these counters it is determined that space is running low, the administrator should try running "Disk Cleanup" from Performance Monitor, compress the hard drive if feasible, or move some files to another disk drive. Monitoring disk efficiency is a little more complicated. complicated than monitoring free space, but it's necessary to ensure your hard drives are running at peak performance. There are a few steps you need to take before monitoring disk efficiency.