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. To […] Read more
SQL Monitor’s dev team has made huge improvements to the product over the last year. In the first half of 2017 alone, they released reporting capabilities, support for collecting metrics from VMWare hosts, significant improvements to performance and scalability, improved configurability of alerts, as well as dozens of smaller enhancements. Since we’re about half way […] Read more
Over the years, running SQL Server inside a virtual machine has changed from being a bit of a strange and risky idea to being commonplace and offering a range of benefits: more effective distribution of load, more flexible provisioning and allowing additional tiers of redundancy to be put in place. Though these factors are compelling, […] Read more
How many times, when reading a report of some highly public case of data loss or corruption, do you inevitably stumble across a line like: ‘Unfortunately the backup job had not been running for the last three months, and no one noticed’? It’s not enough just to set up jobs to run database backups, or […] Read more
It’s just one of those average days for a DBA; everything is cruising along nicely one minute and the next, red alerts, metaphorical or otherwise, start flashing up on one of your SQL Server instances. CPU is through the roof, you see disk IO spikes, memory usage is high. It’s only a matter of time […] Read more
In my last blog post, I talked about how to get SQL Monitor to send alerts to Slack and how to send SNMP Traps. It’s easy to make SQL Monitor send SNMP traps, but SCOM is more challenging than most management tools to configure to receive these traps. This walkthrough shows how to configure SCOM […] Read more
One of SQL Monitor’s most valuable capabilities is raising alerts when bad things happen in SQL Server. The alerts are listed within SQL Monitor but can also be sent out as emails. However, many of our customers have said they’d like to see those alerts in their other systems too. The latest version of SQL […] Read more
I’ve been lucky enough to spend some time as a racing driver, racing BMWs for three years before joining the BRSCC Porsche Championship. Steve McQueen famously said ‘Racing is life. Anything before or after is just waiting’. When I’m waiting, I’m a SQL Server DBA consultant and throughout my racing and DBA career, I’ve realised […] Read more
I recently sat down with Enterprise Architect, Anthony Nocentino, to talk about how effective monitoring can help resolve many of the issues companies face every day. I was fascinated because my career revolves around how we can improve SQL Server monitoring. Anthony’s involves actually doing it at the coalface. He’s made a name for himself […] Read more
