Walkthrough 5: Rewind time

In this walkthrough, we'll see how to use SQL Monitor's 'Rewind time' feature. SQL Monitor stores the performance data it collects in a SQL Server database. Using the Rewind time feature, we can examine the health and performance of our SQL Server environment at a specific point in the past. To go back in time, we click on the 'Rewind time' clock in the top right corner of the Overviews, which brings up the Rewind time Calendar. We can only rewind time from the Overviews tab.

Once this is open, we can either select a day from the Calendar view, or enter a specific date and time in the dialog boxes on the right hand side. We'd like to take a look at what was going on at 9am this morning, so we enter that time in the Time dialog box and click 'Apply'.

This puts us in 'Back in Time' mode. We stay in the Global Overview, but our statistics are those for 9am this morning. We can navigate through the overviews as normal, but our data will remain static, reflecting our point in time. We can move forward or backward using the arrow buttons at the top.

We want to check what was happening about an hour earlier on our homer.testnet machine, so we select it in the Monitored servers menu.

Our statistics are displayed as normal, but also remain static. If we want to check the progress of a particular metric at this time, we can click on it as normal to move to the Analysis tab. We'll check Batch Requests.

Within Back in Time mode, the Analysis tab behaves in the same way as the Statistics tab: data is displayed as normal, but only the data for the point in time we have selected. We can still check all the same performance metrics for any of our servers.