What are you trying to monitor? Monitoring everything is not really a feasible plan. Both SQL Server 2008 R2 and Denali come with the management data warehouse(MDW), and if you have enterprise, the utility control point(UCP) is available. These are monitoring tools built into SQL Server to save the information in several of the DMV s(sys.dm_os_performance_counters included). The information is polled at a certain interval (generally 15 seconds, but you can change) and is saved into the respective database for reporting and inspection at your leisure. One of the reasons this information is polled and saved is because the counters are for specific use, meaning some counters increment from the beginning of the install and many others are reset when SQL Server is restarted. CPU ticks is one I know that needs at least 2 points of data to see what the load on the cpu is. Not sure if this will help you in your endeavor, but if it does , then cool
This said, there are hundreds of SQL Server perfomance counters, If you look in perfmon, when you bring up a SQL counter, there is a description available below, telling you what exactly it does. If you can not find the monster list somewhere, I would try to use powershell to extract all sql counters and their respective descriptions. I would not try to get the information from SQL because it isn t there, it is in the BOL, but not as a list that I have ever seen. Plus to add to problem, not all of the counters are very well documented.
This will give you All SQL related counters in perfmon. Hope this helps. Still working on pulling the description. Don t know powershell that well.
Get-Counter -listSet SQL | %{$_.counter}
there are supposed to be asteriks around the word SQL, but it s formatting to italics, and I m new so I don t know how to get around that yet.