This article demonstrates how to use a script notification, in PowerShell, to automatically send database alerts raised by Redgate Monitor as incidents to New Relic. This simple integration makes it easy to feed the detailed diagnostics that only a specialized database monitoring system such as Redgate Monitor provides, and the DBA team relies on for a rapid response, into a single, organization-wide incident management system. Read more
Redgate 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
How to plan for an effective response to database problems, as part of a broader, 'tiered' monitoring strategy for production systems, where the process to resolve any known or routine problem is provided alongside the associated alert, and any urgent issues that can't be fixed, or threaten the quality of the service, are escalated promptly to the right team. Read more
Database monitoring should be as simple as possible, and yet still allow the users to drill into sufficient detail to be able to recommend a fix to the problem. The trick is to adopt a layered or 'tiered' approach. Read more
SQL Monitor v12.1.28 has added functionality to track queries. This blog post will outline what this does and how it works. What is a tracked query? Tracked queries is a new feature on the Server Overview page for SQL Monitor. It was added in preview in SQL Monitor v12.1.28. This feature allows you to mark Read more
The Estate Configuration reports SQL Server configuration across all your servers, so you can quickly investigate ad-hoc or unauthorized changes to any settings that might affect their performance, stability, or security. Read more
This article explains ten ways that SQL Monitor tackles the problem of scaling out the coverage of a single, lightweight monitoring system, and so allows your teams to maintain the health and performance of larger collections of databases and higher numbers of monitored SQL servers. Read more
How well do the SQL Server licenses you own match up with what you need for your current use? William Durkin explains how to use SQL Monitor to find out. Read more
Josh Crang explains why SQL Monitor will be switched to run on .NET Core, and how the team tested the potential performance improvements in the monitoring service. 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
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
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
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
Faris Hilmi introduces the new Estate pages in SQL Monitor 9, which provide estate-wide views of disk space usage, backups and other jobs, and application of recent SQL Server updates and patches. Using them, a team can review the overall health of all their servers and databases, identify potential issues before they escalate into real problems, and assign priorities, proactively. 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