Digital marketing and customer relationship management agency
Unreliable home-grown monitoring and three hour daily checks
An affordable and powerful SQL Server monitoring tool
Catching deployment issues before they impact the business, and saving 15 hours a week in manual checking
DOS is a digital marketing and customer relationship management agency. Their Senior DBA took the company from having no monitoring on their servers at all, to a comprehensive monitoring setup with automated alerts, using Redgate Monitor.
Now the team can spot performance problems before they become server outages. The team is responsible for the 27 production SQL Servers at DOS.
“We store operational and aggregated data for our clients and we have quite a big BI team that delivers reporting. So we’ve got quite a bit of data in our company,”
Their large BI and in-house development teams deploy software to the servers – but when deployments don’t go smoothly, the DBA team have to be ready
15hours saved per week24production servers15minutes to find and fix a problem“No one was looking at performance of the servers at all, except when there was a problem.”
When the Senior DBA joined the company nine years ago, server monitoring was a distant dream.
“No one was looking at performance of the servers at all, except when there was a problem.”
They briefly used a third-party server monitoring tool, but found it was “almost too much” for their needs. They instead began work on a home-grown monitoring system that used PerfMon counters and hand-written SQL scripts.
This manual system had no reliable alerting mechanism to let them know when things went wrong. Instead, they had a daily three-hour ritual to check every server, examine the monitoring data, and make sure everything was as it should be.
“It was a problem because you had a physical script running on every single server, and when the server was rebooted you had to start it up again. If your server was rebooted by IT we wouldn’t know, and for long periods of time you didn’t have any performance monitoring. Then suddenly you have a problem on the server, only you didn’t have any monitoring information.”
“Redgate Monitor had everything that we needed, and was also much more affordable.”
Recognizing that their monitoring situation was costing them 15 hours a week, they decided to look again at monitoring software. After testing half a dozen tools for performance and ease-of-use, they chose Redgate Monitor.
“Redgate Monitor had everything that we needed, and was also much more affordable.”
The DBA team uses Redgate Monitor to keep an eye on 24 of their 27 servers. With so many servers to monitor, they needed a tool that let the team see all of them in one place.
“With Redgate Monitor, everything is collected in one database and we connect to all the servers from the one interface. It lets us see everything visually from one central point of view.”
They were also able to replace the more bespoke functionality of their homegrown monitoring system with Redgate Monitor’s custom metrics feature: adding their own metrics for checking data replication, watching log file growth, and making sure DBCC was being run.
“I would definitely recommend Redgate Monitor. What you're looking for is right there in one place. It’s easy to set up, easy to get used to and it really does save time”
One weekday evening the company deployed some new software, an online game, onto one of their servers. The Senior DBA checked the Analysis graph in Redgate Monitor just after the deployment, and noticed the server was being hit hard.
“As soon as we’d deployed it, the CPU usage had gone from 20% to 80%.”
They set the time range in Redgate Monitor to the past 24 hours and went to the Top 10 Expensive Queries report. This showed them which queries had been taking up the most processing time since the deployment.
They discovered the culprit was a single badly-written query, originating from the recently deployed application. They were able to go to the development team with the data, and after rewriting the query, CPU usage on the server dropped back down to 20%. This early warning system was essential for catching deployment problems.
“It took us probably 15 minutes to pinpoint the problem. If we didn’t have Redgate Monitor, we wouldn’t have noticed it until we deployed the next thing on that server, and all of a sudden the server would have flatlined.”
The DBA team can now confidently catch performance problems as soon as they happen, and no longer have to spend hours manually collecting monitoring data.
“I would definitely recommend Redgate Monitor. What you’re looking for is right there in one place. It’s easy to set up, easy to get used to and it really does save time.”
ROI guide
See how much you and your company could save by monitoring your servers with SQL Monitor – it only takes a few minutes.
whitepaper
In this guide, we take you through the ways a robust SQL Server monitoring solution has a positive impact across your organization, from the development teams to IT management, and from finance to the C-suite.
When digital marketing and customer relationship management agency Digital Outsource Services switched to Redgate Monitor to monitor 24 production servers, they saved 15 hours a week.
Digital marketing and customer relationship management agency
Unreliable home-grown monitoring and three hour daily checks
An affordable and powerful SQL Server monitoring tool
Catching deployment issues before they impact the business, and saving 15 hours a week in manual checking
“No one was looking at performance of the servers at all, except when there was a problem.”
DOS is a digital marketing and customer relationship management agency. Their Senior DBA took the company from having no monitoring on their servers at all, to a comprehensive monitoring setup with automated alerts, using Redgate Monitor.
Now the team can spot performance problems before they become server outages. The team is responsible for the 27 production SQL Servers at DOS.
“We store operational and aggregated data for our clients and we have quite a big BI team that delivers reporting. So we’ve got quite a bit of data in our company,”
Their large BI and in-house development teams deploy software to the servers – but when deployments don’t go smoothly, the DBA team have to be ready
“Redgate Monitor had everything that we needed, and was also much more affordable.”
When the Senior DBA joined the company nine years ago, server monitoring was a distant dream.
“No one was looking at performance of the servers at all, except when there was a problem.”
They briefly used a third-party server monitoring tool, but found it was “almost too much” for their needs. They instead began work on a home-grown monitoring system that used PerfMon counters and hand-written SQL scripts.
This manual system had no reliable alerting mechanism to let them know when things went wrong. Instead, they had a daily three-hour ritual to check every server, examine the monitoring data, and make sure everything was as it should be.
“It was a problem because you had a physical script running on every single server, and when the server was rebooted you had to start it up again. If your server was rebooted by IT we wouldn’t know, and for long periods of time you didn’t have any performance monitoring. Then suddenly you have a problem on the server, only you didn’t have any monitoring information.”
“I would definitely recommend Redgate Monitor. What you're looking for is right there in one place. It’s easy to set up, easy to get used to and it really does save time”
Recognizing that their monitoring situation was costing them 15 hours a week, they decided to look again at monitoring software. After testing half a dozen tools for performance and ease-of-use, they chose Redgate Monitor.
“Redgate Monitor had everything that we needed, and was also much more affordable.”
The DBA team uses Redgate Monitor to keep an eye on 24 of their 27 servers. With so many servers to monitor, they needed a tool that let the team see all of them in one place.
“With Redgate Monitor, everything is collected in one database and we connect to all the servers from the one interface. It lets us see everything visually from one central point of view.”
They were also able to replace the more bespoke functionality of their homegrown monitoring system with Redgate Monitor’s custom metrics feature: adding their own metrics for checking data replication, watching log file growth, and making sure DBCC was being run.
One weekday evening the company deployed some new software, an online game, onto one of their servers. The Senior DBA checked the Analysis graph in Redgate Monitor just after the deployment, and noticed the server was being hit hard.
“As soon as we’d deployed it, the CPU usage had gone from 20% to 80%.”
They set the time range in Redgate Monitor to the past 24 hours and went to the Top 10 Expensive Queries report. This showed them which queries had been taking up the most processing time since the deployment.
They discovered the culprit was a single badly-written query, originating from the recently deployed application. They were able to go to the development team with the data, and after rewriting the query, CPU usage on the server dropped back down to 20%. This early warning system was essential for catching deployment problems.
“It took us probably 15 minutes to pinpoint the problem. If we didn’t have Redgate Monitor, we wouldn’t have noticed it until we deployed the next thing on that server, and all of a sudden the server would have flatlined.”
The DBA team can now confidently catch performance problems as soon as they happen, and no longer have to spend hours manually collecting monitoring data.
“I would definitely recommend Redgate Monitor. What you’re looking for is right there in one place. It’s easy to set up, easy to get used to and it really does save time.”
