[thelist] performance monitoring?

[Paulette Neal-Allen]

Hello the list, I discovered y'all after AListApart went down and they have a link to your most excellent site.  I've been lurking for a while now, and now that I have been asked to do something I don't know how to do, I want to pick your brains.
I work for a medium-size city, and we recently hired a consultant to re-do our site.  Now, they did not do exactly what I would have done had I designed the site, but it works (mostly) and it's much, much better than the old site.
The issue - we want to begin monitoring system performance, and I have been asked to put together a draft proposal for policies and procedures for doing that.  I've been doing a lot of poking around, and have discovered many excellent references, but they all seem to assume that I know what they are talking about.
We have a hosted (as in, we don't own the box) Win2K server that is running IIS5, and we have approximately 500 pages now, with more to come.  We use ASP extensively, with all our menus generated on the fly from a (an?  does SQL start with a vowel or a consonant?) SQL7 database.  If we discover significant problems during our measurements, we can do some re-writing of the back-end code, but right now we don't even have a baseline to go from.

A)  Can someone point me to a "Web Site Performance 101" type article/reference?  One that uses really, really short words and preferably has directions on how to set up what it is that they are talking about?

B)  You all are professionals - what do you monitor? Why?  What do you do with the statistics?  Is the built-in Performance Monitor tool good enough, or is there a significant business reason that you would recommend another tool?

Many, many thank yous in advance!

Paulette Neal-Allen
Programmer Analyst
City of Thornton, Colorado, USA
pnealall at ci.thornton.co.us