Where is SAM SQL Server Cost Threshold for Parallelism and MAXDOP

Hi there,

First of all I'm new to this forum and kind of new to Solarwinds in general so bear with me please. When having a look at some of our monitored SQL Server instances I've been searching for two key default settings that I thought I would find in SAM for SQL Server, MAXDOP and Cost Threshold for Parallelism. Since I found this "cdn.swcdn.net/.../SW_SAM_Application_Playbook_whitepaper.pdf" I'm pretty sure it is somewhere and I just didn't see it. However, maybe I'm just mistaken and Solarwinds will not display these server settings but just some metrics that are affected by this and I will have to use other means to find out the particular settings of the instance. Could someone point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Martin

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Accepted answers

mesverrum

SAM isn't config management unfortunately, so no it doesn't scrape settings from the SQL server beyond the minimal set it needs to identify what you are monitoring. As a sort of work around you could set up a SQL user experience monitor with a query that shows you the current settings from the system tables, since SQL stores all the config inside the db. Something like

Keep in mind the SQL monitor only accepts a single row of results, and the first column has to be a number which should be fine since i believe this is a 0/1 bit kind of field. You can optionally have a second column that displays a string message but in this case you are probably fine to just name the component "SQL MAXDOP" and wouldn't need anything further.
If I was setting up a component like that I would probably change the polling interval to something like once a day since I don't really need to be collecting this and turning it into a stat hundreds of times every day.

<span class="hljs-keyword"></span><pre class="code codeBlock" spellcheck="false" tabindex="0">SELECT value_in_use as Statistic
FROM sys.configurations
WHERE description LIKE '%parallelism%'</pre><span class="hljs-string"><br /><br /></span>

All comments

mesverrum

Keep in mind the SQL monitor only accepts a single row of results, and the first column has to be a number which should be fine since i believe this is a 0/1 bit kind of field. You can optionally have a second column that displays a string message but in this case you are probably fine to just name the component "SQL MAXDOP" and wouldn't need anything further.
If I was setting up a component like that I would probably change the polling interval to something like once a day since I don't really need to be collecting this and turning it into a stat hundreds of times every day.

<span class="hljs-keyword"></span><pre class="code codeBlock" spellcheck="false" tabindex="0">SELECT value_in_use as Statistic
FROM sys.configurations
WHERE description LIKE '%parallelism%'</pre><span class="hljs-string"><br /><br /></span>

mscholl

Thanks for your help. Indeed, it is not too nice that these values have to be fetched using some kind of workaround. However, at least that works and I can have them kind of attached to the node/application instead of fetching them via other means. Thanks again!