SAM and SQL

In this posting, aLTeReGo points out what we're working on for the next release of SAM. One of the major improvements he mentions is SQL database monitoring. Once this release is out in the wild, I'm sure all of you DBAs and Sysadmins will be very happy; however, this is today. Today this new feature is not quite finished being cooked. In the meantime, I'll share a tip, courtesy of fellow thwackian, rhrland2021.

Say you're using SAM to monitor your SQL server(s), and say like many shops you may have multiple instances of sqlservr.exe. You want to monitor them individually, so you can see which instances/DBs might be chewing CPU at inopportune times. In this example, I have four instances I want to monitor - call them DB1, DB2, DB3, and DB4. By using command-line filtering when setting up the application monitor, I can instruct SAM to monitor specific instances. When viewing Task Manager on the SQL server, we see that each of the separate instance executables use a switch to specify instance - something like -sDB1 is found at the end of that invoked instance. I enter that switch into the command-line filter of my SAM template, I get a nice, accurate list of the specific instances and their respective memory and CPU use. Easy! Bigger shops in crazy I/O environments can use this as a first stop when examining basic SQL health.

Here's a sample snip that shows me how these procs are doing:

sql2.png

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