Wait stats are essential performance metrics for diagnosing SQL Server Performance problems. Related metrics can be monitored from different DMVs including sys.dm_os_wait_stats and sys.dm_db_wait_stats (Azure).
As you probably know, there are 2 categories of DMVs in SQL Server: Point in time versus cumulative and DMVs mentioned previously are in the second category. It means data in these DMVs are accumulative and incremented every time wait events occur. Values reset only when SQL Server restarts or when you intentionally run DBCC SQLPERF command. Baselining these metric values require taking snapshots to compare day-to-day activity or maybe simply trends for a given timeline. Paul Randal kindly provided a TSQL script for trend analysis in a specified time range in this blog post. The interesting part of this script is the focus of most relevant wait types and corresponding statistics. This is basically the kind of scripts I used for many years when I performed SQL Server audits at customer shops but today working as database administrator for a company, I can rely on our observability stack that includes Telegraf / Prometheus and Grafana to do the job.
