Monitoring Windows server memory

jlintner

As we all know, when we add a Windows server to NPM using SNMP for monitoring, we have the option for virtual and physical memory.  Do you select only one, or always both?  Virtual memory allocation and utilization changes as the OS requests it, and physical memory is typically all "reserved" by the OS, so how is that a good representation of memory utilization?  Maybe I'm mis-understanding Windows memory allocation, but I'm more of a network guy anyway.

Thanks for responding!

RomeoG

Our server team has their own instance of Solarwinds, but I know they monitor both physical and virtual. Virtual memory usage can be an indication of an active problem or configuration issue just as much as physical memory usage. Even if you are not necessarily alerting on virtual memory usage, the trending data can be used to help troubleshoot performance issues. For example, you might correlate a spike in VM usage to a time when performance was known to be bad and that might lead to isolating a memory issue.