This article is an outcome of the technical discussion of activity monitor and its behavior with my friend and SQL Expert Tejas Shah. Tejas told me that he does not like to re-write content from MSDN, but rather prefer to write real life scenarios, as that prepares him to become a better SQL Expert. While discussing about Activity Monitor he informed that it throws an error when there is a permissions issue. He has even blogged about how to give permissions to user to launch activity monitor on his blog . Tejas asked me to write on the same subject for SQL Server 2008. Here is the article covering the discussion I had with Tejas.