The Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) 2021.3 release provides several significant alert monitoring and management enhancements, including:

• All-new alerts status monitoring page
• New alert details and history presentation
• Home page alert status for each monitored database instance
• Acknowledgement of alerts

The new changes not only make it easier to find and focus on the alerts you’re interested in but also coordinate responses and eliminate redundant analysis.

New and Improved Alerts Status Monitoring

The Current Alert Status page has added several features for you to filter, sort, search, and acknowledge alerts.

Alert Filtering

There are seven different filter types you can leverage to filter the list of alerts displayed:

• Status – Select what alert status severities you want to view
• Database Instance – Filter alerts for specific Database Instance Names
• Acknowledgement – Show alerts based on their acknowledgement status
• Acknowledged by – Filter alerts acknowledged by a particular user
• Alert category – Show alerts belonging to the specified alert category
• Alert name – Display specific alerts matching selected names
• Alert type - Display specific alerts matching selected alert types

In the above example, the alerts were filtered to only display the alerts for the database instance DPASQL2K17.

If you noticed the SQL Server Backup Frequency alert on DPASQL2K17, you may want to see if other database instances have missed their backup frequency as well. To do so, change the filters by selecting “SQL Server Backup Frequency” in the “Alert name” filter type.

Now you can see DPASQL2K12 has also missed some of its backup requirements.

Alert Details and History

If you click on an alert name on the Alert Status page, it will take you to a page showing the details of the current alert and history of its collection and status changes.

Clicking on a “log freespace filling up” alert for DPASQL2K17 will take you to the following example. In the upper left, you can see the various details related to the current status of the alert, including the fact that it was acknowledged on August 26. In the upper right are the details of the alert’s definition and the list of database instances currently applying that alert.

The bottom section shows a history of the alert’s status changes, including the duration of the status and the number evaluations of the alert with that status.

Clicking on the blue right arrow on a row in the history section will show you the results of all the individual alert evaluations executed within the duration of that row.

Home Page Alert Status

On the home page, you can now quickly identify which database instances have current alerts. A new “Alert” column has been added to the home page to show the worst current alert status for each monitored database instance.

In the alert column, if you click on the status icon for a particular database row, it will immediately take you to the Alert Status page and automatically apply a filter to only display the alerts for that particular database instance. 

Acknowledgement of Alerts

If an alert already has someone looking into it, they can acknowledge the alert with that information, so others don’t redundantly investigate it as well.

Acknowledging an alert allows you to add a short description. For example, you might want to let others know you have already opened a trouble ticket, determined the root cause, or any other information that may be helpful to others.

The below acknowledgement example indicates the problem is understood and will be fixed in the next maintenance interval. This should prevent other users from wasting time investigating the alert further.

Summary

As you can see, there have been quite a few enhancements to DPA’s alerting capabilities. These changes should make it easier to identify, navigate, and manage alerts. Let us know your thoughts on the changes and any suggestions for improvement.