Product articles Database Performance Monitoring

Troubleshooting SQL Server Queries using Actual Execution Plans

For SQL Server 2019 onwards, SQL Monitor can now show the actual execution plan, complete with runtime statistics, for expensive queries that were running over any period of investigation. This means you'll not only know how SQL Server executed your poorly performing query but also see accurate runtime data. Any big discrepancies between estimated and actual row counts will be revealed, and SQL Monitor will highlight any warnings and offer recommendations. Read more

Integrating SQL Monitor into a Tier-1 Alert and Notification System

SQL Monitor provides detail-level diagnostic data that will allow an expert to drill down to establish the cause of, and a fix for, any database problem. However, with support for webhooks, it can also contribute alerts to the sort of "Tier 1" alerting and paging system that an operations team might use to get an immediate notification of an urgent problem, anywhere on the network, and then coordinate a timely response. Read more

Is Tempdb Causing a Bottleneck?

One of your SQL Server instance shows a major dip in performance or throughput, affecting all the user databases. You notice that the slow interludes coincide, as if orchestrated. On investigation, it appears that several transactions running over that period were using a lot of space in tempdb. However, which of them, if any, are causing the tempdb bottleneck, and why? Read more