SQL Server performance counter for incoming and outgoing bytes

Question

For a project I need to read the incoming and outgoing bytes per second of an SQL-Server (2012) instance of an instance or database (doesn't matter). For this I found the following performance counters:

SQL Server, Broker / DBM Transport Object

• Receive I/O bytes/sec
• Send I/O bytes/sec

When starting SQL Server Management Studio and executing some select statements the values of the performance counters are staying 0. While when I included the client statistics I see that Bytes sent from client and Bytes sent from server are not 0. I'm executing these select statements to a default installed installed on the same pc.

Does anyone how to solve this issue?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The documentation explains what SQL Server, Broker / DBM Transport Object measures:

The Broker / DBM Transport performance object contains performance counters that report networking information for Service Broker and database mirroring.

There is no performance counter for Transact-SQL traffic. If it helps, the DMV sys.dm_exec_connections will aggregate the traffic size for a connection. If the traffic occurs over a network interface then you could use the system network counters, that is the Network Interface Object. But a local test would not register anything because the connection will use shared memory protocol.

That being said, it is unusual to have to measure SQL Server Transact-SQL network traffic. If the question ever arise, then you're doing it wrong. Network traffic should always be negligible. The dimension everybody is interested is IO, for which there is support in SQL Server, Buffer Manager Object, SQL Server, Databases Object and DMVs like sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats.