SQL Monitor 10.0.5 now supports a user role called "Reports user". A user added to this role, by an administrator, will be able to 'self-serve' SQL Monitor reports but won't be able to configure any other aspect of the monitoring service. Jeremiah Peschka explains how it works. Read more
SQL Monitor 10 packs a lot more under the hood in terms of connectivity, establishing cause-and-effect, and alerting. This article provides the high-level tour of the features we've introduced or improved, and why. Read more
How to use RAISERROR() in T-SQL to send annotations to SQL Monitor, so you can observe the direct impact of application tasks, or server changes, on the SQL Server metrics. Read more
When the tempdb database is heavily used, processes in any database on the instance will be forced to wait, due to contention as the SQL Server engine tries to manage allocation pages in tempdb. Phil Factor shows how to monitor for signs of trouble. Read more
Phil Factor creates a simple custom metric to track the number of sessions that have recently done a read or write on a database. Having established a baseline for the metric, you'll be able to spot, and investigate the cause of, any wild deviations from normal behavior. 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
Using a PowerShell script that collects log data from a web server, plus a SQL Monitor custom metric, Phil Factor offers a way to check for suspicious website errors and unusual patterns of activity, right alongside your database monitoring. 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
SQL Monitor tells us immediately when significant blocking occurs, and where, during busy periods, and provides the full blocking chain, in an easy-to-digest graphical format, so we can diagnose and resolve the blocking quickly. Read more
Overuse of ad-hoc queries by applications is a common source of SQL Server performance problems. The symptoms include high CPU and memory pressure. Phil Factor offers a simple custom metric to monitor the percentage of ad-hoc queries being executed on a database, and shows how SQL Monitor can detect when the problem is happening, and show you the queries that are affecting the server. Read more