SCOM is good at monitoring the status of your servers. SQL Monitor give you a detailed view of your SQL Server instances, and databases, right across your network, however they are hosted. By using tools appropriately, for the tasks they do well, you benefit from a simpler and more comprehensive overall strategy. Read more
A monitoring tool must provide us with an understanding of the often-complex performance patterns that databases exhibit when under load, so that we can predict how they will cope with expansion or increase in scale. It must also helps us spot the symptoms of stress and act before they become problems that affect the service, and understand better what was happening within a database when an intermittent problem started. Read more
If we know how a database is likely to be attacked, we can arrange our lines of defense, and install the monitors required to detect any attempts. However, some types of attack are difficult to imagine, so we also need our monitoring tool to be adaptable, so that it can collect a more diffuse collection of metrics, and then help us determine the reason for any sudden change in the patterns of access . Read more
Tony Davis describes the features and capabilities of SQL Monitor that allow it to scale smoothly to monitor a growing estate of servers and databases, while still providing a single, simple dashboard that gives the team all of the essential SQL Server metrics and alerts, establishes baselines, and detects trends in behavior. Read more
Kathi Kellenberger introduces the new Estate monitoring pages in SQL Monitor 9, and explains how they will help DBAs monitor and safeguard the security, stability and availability of all servers in their care. Read more
Rodney Landrum describes how a monitoring tool must help us monitor, analyze and predict resource usage, including costs, across a growing and diversifying estate, and also help the organization to connect server resource usage and error conditions directly to their impact on business processes. Read more
Grant Fritchey explains how a modern monitoring tool must adapt, as our SQL Server databases grow in number and size, and migrate onto new cloud-based, containerized or virtual machine-based SQL Servers. Read more
If your SQL Server estate is large, or installed across different, isolated networks, or both, then you need a distributed monitoring solution. It is very easy to set up multiple base monitors in SQL Monitor, and then to manage the monitoring, alerting and troubleshooting for your entire SQL Server estate, from a single web interface. Read more
Sudden performance issues in SQL Server can have many causes, ranging all the way from malfunctioning hardware, through to simple misconfiguration, or perhaps just end users doing things they shouldn't. But one particularly common culprit is when deployments go wrong: I don't know a single DBA who hasn't been burned by a bad release. Read more