DOs and Don’t when Running Profiler

We run profiler often for many reasons. We generally, do this on Test/UAT environment. Running profiler on production is not recommended but not completely avoidable always. You may need to run profiler/trace even on production server. But to get better result with less overload, we may need to follow some guideline. I think following are the general guideline which we can follow when we run profiler on any environment.

(a) Do not save the trace result into a table on the same database
(b) Run the trace with proper filter. Monitor only the required events otherwise the trace may overload the system.
(c) Run the trace from any other machines other than which you are monitoring. You can connect from Test server or any other workstation which acts as a monitor to the actual server.
(d) If you are running the trace for workload then run the Trace for the whole business day when activities are high to get exact picture.
(e) Create a template with the events you need and save it to re-use.
(f) You may save the result to a table so that you can run sql query against it.

Note : It is always recommended to run T-SQL Storedprocedure that define the trace rather than running Profiler GUI.