Troubleshooting SQL Server Queries using Actual Execution Plans

For SQL Server 2019 onwards, SQL Monitor can now show the actual execution plan, complete with runtime statistics, for expensive queries that were running over any period of investigation. This means you'll not only know how SQL Server executed your poorly performing query but also see accurate runtime data. Any big discrepancies between estimated and actual row counts will be revealed, and SQL Monitor will highlight any warnings and offer recommendations. Read more

Integrating SQL Monitor into a Tier-1 Alert and Notification System

SQL 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

Finding and Tuning Expensive Stored Procedures using SQL Monitor

SQL Monitor's Top procedures list makes it simple to find the procedures having the biggest impact on performance, allowing you to prioritize your tuning efforts, reduce risk and keep pace with the requirements of your growing database estate. Read more

Monitoring Azure SQL Database with SQL Monitor

Grant Fritchey explains the Azure-tailored metrics and alerts that you need to diagnose performance problems with your Azure SQL Databases, and let you know which resource (CPU, data IO or log IO) is the bottleneck. Read more

Tracking Queries in Redgate SQL Monitor

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

Top Query Search in SQL Monitor

SQL Monitor v12.0 has added a new Query Text Search feature to allow users to search the text of the most expensive queries that executed on a SQL Server instance over a period. Here's what it does, and how it works. Read more

Tracking SQL Server Configuration Across All Your Servers Using SQL Monitor

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

Why is my SQL Server Query Suddenly Slow?

A SQL Server query is suddenly running slowly, for no obvious reason. Grant Fritchey shares a 5-point plan to help you track down the cause and fix the problem. Read more

Is Tempdb Causing a Bottleneck?

One of your SQL Server instance shows a major dip in performance or throughput, affecting all the user databases. You notice that the slow interludes coincide, as if orchestrated. On investigation, it appears that several transactions running over that period were using a lot of space in tempdb. However, which of them, if any, are causing the tempdb bottleneck, and why? Read more

Ten Reasons your SQL Server Monitoring will Scale

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

Improving SQL Monitor’s Database Performance

Jeremiah Peschka, a tech lead for SQL Monitor development, explains the new SQL Server configuration options available for the data repository, and how enabling them might improve SQL Monitor performance, when reading and writing monitoring data. Read more

When SQL Server Performance Goes Bad: Rogue Indexes

Phil Factor explains how SQL Monitor helps focus performance tuning efforts on the tables and queries where 'rogue indexes' might be a significant problem, and then how to identify both 'missing' indexes that might be beneficial to the overall workload, and those that are unused or duplicated, and so are doing more harm than good. Read more

When SQL Server Performance Goes Bad: Implicit Conversions

In this article, you'll learn how to detect and remove a common cause of SQL Server query performance problems: reliance on implicit datatype conversions. We'll use a combination of plan cache queries, extended events, and SQL Monitor. Read more

Introduction to Analyzing Waits using SQL Monitor

Phil Factor sets out with the modest aim of giving you enough of an introduction to waits to better understand the wait information you get from a SQL Server monitoring tool like SQL Monitor, and the rather overwhelming amount of information available in the underlying DMVs and Extended Events. Read more

Gathering SQL Server Performance Counters for Multiple Servers

SQL Multi Script can easily be persuaded to run queries at the server level rather than the database level. It is also able to combine results from many databases even if the results aren't identical but have some different columns. Phil Factor demonstrates how this works, when collecting a set of performance counters from all databases on a distribution list of servers. Read more

Unboxing SQL Toolbelt: What is SQL Multi Script for?

SQL Multi Script does one thing and does it well: it will run whatever script or scripts you select, on a list of databases, and collate all the results neatly. However, it has a surprising number of uses. Phil Factor explains how it works and then uses it to search 100 databases, for occurrences of a string, in about 7 seconds. Read more

Automate Responses to Bad Deployments with SQL Monitor

Jamie Wallis explains how SQL Monitor can both reveal quickly who ran a deployment, and when, and automate the incident-response workflow to ensure it's dealt with swiftly. By extending such workflows to development and test servers, as well as production, the feedback cycle starts earlier, and you can stop problems from ever reaching the users. Read more

When SQL Server Performance goes Bad: the Fill Factor and Excessive Fragmentation

Phil Factor on the fill factor, pages splits and index fragmentation, and how SQL Monitor can help you decide if a custom fill factor for certain indexes might help alleviate performance issues. Read more

SQL Monitor Roadtrip: Preparation

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

Adding Reports Users to SQL Monitor

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

What’s New in SQL Monitor 10?

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

Tagging SQL Server Changes in SQL Monitor

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

Monitoring TempDB Contention using Extended Events and SQL Monitor

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

Tracking the number of active sessions on a database using SQL Monitor

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

Monitoring SQL Server Performance: What’s Required?

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

Monitoring the Application with SQL Monitor: Website Activity

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

Managing the SQL Server Estate

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

Troubleshooting Blocking in SQL Server using SQL Monitor

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

Custom Metrics for Detecting Problems with Ad-hoc Queries

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

Using SQL Monitor to Detect Problems on Databases that use Snapshot-based Transaction Isolation

Use of the read committed snapshot isolation level is often an effective way to alleviate blocking problems in SQL Server, without needing to rewrite the application. However, it can sometimes lead to tempdb contention. This article offers a small-scale solution (not suitable for use on large tables) to detect cases when tempdb contention is related to use of RCSI. Read more

Monitoring and Troubleshooting Deadlocks with SQL Monitor

This article explains what SQL Server deadlocks are, why they occur, why they require immediate investigation, and the diagnostic data required to troubleshoot them. It then demonstrates an "Update Order" deadlock condition and shows how to find the cause quickly, in SQL Monitor, using the Extended Events deadlock graph provided by the deadlock alert. Read more

Investigating problems with ad-hoc queries using SQL Monitor

Phil Factor demonstrates the performance problems that overuse of ad-hoc queries can cause and then how SQL Monitor can warn us when they are the cause of these problems on your SQL Servers, using built-in metrics such as SQL Compilations/sec metric and Batch Requests/sec. Read more

How to monitor the impact of patching on SQL Server performance

This article uses the Spectre/Meltdown bugs as means to demonstrate how you can use a tool like SQL Monitor to assess the impact of patching on the throughput and performance of your SQL Servers. Read more

SQL Monitor Quick Tip: Using the SQL static code analysis performance rules

This quick tip illustrates SQL Monitor's built-in set of Performance Rules for static code analysis. These rules are designed to highlight SQL syntax that could potential cause performance problems, and so indicate ways to improve the overall quality and performance of the workload, over time. Read more

Troubleshooting a painful query using execution plans in SQL Monitor

How to use SQL Monitor to identify an unusual set of behaviors on the server, then narrow down the cause of the behaviors to a particular query. Within that query we have the starting point for tuning the query to get better performance. Read more