Activity Monitor
Activity Monitor displays information about SQL Server processes and how these processes affect the current instance of SQL Server.
Benefits of Activity Monitor
Activity Monitor is a tabbed document window that has the following expandable and collapsible panes: Overview, Active User Tasks, Resource Waits, Data File I/O, and Recent Expensive Queries. When any pane is expanded, Activity Monitor queries the instance for information. When a pane is collapsed, all querying activity stops for that pane. You can also expand one or more panes at the same time to view different kinds of activity on the instance.
For the columns that are included in the Active User Tasks, Resource Waits, Data File I/O, and Recent Expensive Queries panes, you can customize the display in the following ways:
To rearrange the order of the columns, click the column heading and drag it to another location in the heading ribbon.
To sort a column, click the column name.
To filter on one or more columns, click the drop-down arrow in the column heading, and then select a value.
Related Tasks
Use the following tasks to get started with Activity Monitor:
| Description | Topic |
| Describes how to open Activity Monitor and how to set the Activity Monitor refresh interval. | Open Activity Monitor (SQL Server Management Studio) |
| Links to topics for server performance and activity monitoring. | Server Performance and Activity Monitoring |