Unexplained PLE drop
Out of nowhere PLE drops from 30k to 0. No noticeable lazy writer activity, no change in buffer size, and no real change in activity other than 3 queries that were aborted around the same time (suspicious).
No evidence trail in the form of error logs, or other performance data, not even IO latency that would be considered out of the ordinary for this server.
Afterward, PLE slowly made it's way back up throughout the day, and applications didn't seem to take any memory related performance hits, so it basically seemed like a false alarm.
Any thoughts? Possible faulty counter?
Unfortunately I can't retry them to find out for certain, but there's a likelihood similar queries will come in next week about the same time, so I'm setting up a condition to watch for them.
SELECT @@SERVERNAME AS [Server Name], [object_name], instance_name, cntr_value AS [Page Life Expectancy]
FROM sys.dm_os_performance_counters WITH (NOLOCK)
WHERE [object_name] LIKE N'%Buffer Node%' — Handles named instances
AND counter_name = N'Page life expectancy' OPTION (RECOMPILE);