This month’s T-SQL Tuesday is hosted by Catherine Wilhelmsen (b|t) and is on monitoring. I figured, considering my employer and all, I should probably write a blog post. When I started as a DBA, I equated monitoring with alerting. I put everything that I might ever need to know in an alert and, as you can imagine, I…
A question customers frequently ask of our support and professional services teams is: "How do I get Performance Advisor to collect performance counter <X>?" This is something that's quite easy to do, although there are a few things a DBA needs to consider before starting down this path: * Why do you want this new counter…
How can I save my settings for SQL Sentry? This is a common question that comes in to our support team. Because the settings for SQL Sentry are stored in a variety of tables throughout the database, our reply in almost all cases is to make sure you are regularly backing up the SQL Sentry database as you would do with any…
My friend and colleague @jason.hall (@SQLSaurus) has been cranking out a great blog series on Mining Performance Data from SQL Sentry (Part 1) Last week I received three separate requests about how to query Top SQL data that we've collected with Performance Advisor, so I thought I would pitch in and help Jason out. He…
Occasionally, you may need to connect the SQL Sentry Client to a SQL Sentry database in another domain. If you don't have a SQL authentication login for that server, you will need Windows Authentication, using a remote domain account. But without a trust, you won't be able to use the credentials from your local…
A customer recently asked me how they could detect any trends in network availability, since they knew that when we lose connectivity to a server, we have a client alert that indicates that - at least as far as we're concerned - the server is offline. They were trying to correlate these network blips with real service…
SQL Sentry has many customers who have found our monitoring and deep dive tuning capabilities to be a great complement to System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) in their SQL Server environment. SCOM does not provide much out-of-the-box functionality for SQL Server, even with the SQL Server Management Pack. SQL Sentry…
Introduction We covered a lot in Mining Performance Data from SQL Sentry (Part 5) , and at the end we were able to start working with SQL Server waits statistics stored in the SQL Sentry repository database. In this post, since we don’t need to go over a lot of table definitions, I want to focus on the query itself, and go…
Introduction As I promised in Mining Performance Data from SQL Sentry (Part 4) , we're going to start digging into database objects that will let us mine current, and historical, performance data from the SQL Sentry database, starting with this post. There are quite a few objects that store metadata or data concerning…
We've recently come across multiple customers who have had excessively high LCK_M_SCH_M waits. These surface in sys.dm_os_wait_stats, but much more visibly in the SQL Sentry Performance Advisor dashboard: Upon digging deeper, we observed the following resource_description in sys.dm_os_waiting_tasks: metadatalock…
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