what other tools exists to capture database level data

Both SQL Server and Windows offer a lot of data to help troubleshoot and monitor overall usage and performance for your SQL Server databases. Within SQL Server there are several DBCC commands as well as a lot newly exposed data from the Dynamic Management Views in SQL Server 2005.

One way of monitoring your individual database usage is to view the data from the dbo.sysprocesses table or sys.sysprocesses in SQL 2005. This data is also exposed by either using the GUI tools or by running sp_who2. From this you can tell who is currently connected to each database and the activity that is occurring, but it is not very easy to create a baseline or a trend from this data. Another approach is to run a server side trace or use Profiler to capture the data. This may be helpful, but this may give you too much information as well as still having the need to extract the data to figure out what is going on within each database. So what other tools exists to capture database level data?

Solution
Most DBAs and developers probably use Profiler, trace, review query plans, run sp_who2, run DBCCs, etc... to capture data to figure out what is currently running on the database server. These tools are great, but don't give you the entire picture in an easy to use way.

Another tool that all DBAs and developers should use is Performance Monitor. This OS level tool provides great insight into Windows counters, but also into specific SQL Server counters. There are hundreds of counters that are exposed within this tool and there are several that are specific to SQL Server.

To launch Performance Monitor, click Start, Run... and type in "perfmon" and the following should open. This application can also be found under the Administrative Tools.

To add a counter, click on the + icon or use Ctrl + I and the following will open.

Most of the counters are server specific and do not give you insight into each individual database, but the following list of counters are at the database level, so this means you can collect this data for each database that is on the server as well as an overall count for all databases.