Setting up SQL Monitor without a bit of preparation work is a bit like embarking on a road trip without first learning to drive. Phil Factor show the essential kit and route maps you need for the journey. Read more
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
Not only are SQL Monitor Groups probably the neatest and most maintainable way of ensuring that all your SQL Servers have the best possible configuration of alerts, but they represent a powerful way of categorizing your SQL Server estate. In this article, I'll show how to use the SQL Monitor PowerShell API to export these groups, save their settings onto a configuration management system, or compare groups of settings to see the differences between them. 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
You need to make sure that nobody tampers with your production databases, or really any databases outside Development. Even if you weren't of a nervous disposition, you'd want to know if a database was stopped or removed. You'd also be intrigued by the sudden unrehearsed addition of a database to a production server. Read more
Splunk is a search engine for collecting and analyzing all sorts of "machine data", including log data and metrics for SQL Server. SQL Monitor gives you the detailed diagnostic view of all your SQL Server instances, and databases. If you have Splunk to monitor your applications and server infrastructure, and SQL Monitor to help you understand the behavior of a complex database system such as SQL Server, then you have a powerful and capable monitoring tool set. Read more
New Relic Infrastructure is a capable server monitoring tool but adding Integrations provides only 'bare bones' monitoring for SQL Server. Grant Fritchey argues that to "instrument" a complex system such as SQL Server, effectively, you also need a tool that is built specifically for this purpose. Read more
This article explains the basic components of a tech stack, and the decisions and requirements that affect how and where monitoring tools generally, and a specialist SQL Server monitoring tool like SQL Monitor, in particular, fit into your stack. Read more
The ease with which new cloud-based, containerized or virtual machine-based SQL Servers can be provisioned means that estates are growing quickly, and across diverse platforms. This presents some challenges. For example, when working with our customers, we hear frequently that, as their estates grow, it becomes harder and more time-consuming to control and refine the Read more
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