SQL SERVER – SSMS: Server Dashboard Report

The term dashboards come from the automobile world where it meant as instrumentation or controls for operating a vehicle. In the IT parlance, the use of dashboards meant as the state or health of system or organizations. Though this analogy cannot be taken too far because running a business is not same as running a vehicle. But the similarities of knowing the health of the system is bang-on. Let us learn about Server Dashboard Report in this blog post.

In our previous post, I gave an introduction on where to find all the SQL Server Management Studio reports. Today we will look at the first and the most basic report all of us must be working with. It is called as “Server Dashboard” report under the Server node, standard reports node.

This report gives and overview of various settings in a SQL Server instance. As the name suggests, it shows the health of SQL Server instance level and has three sections to examine. We will investigate each of these sections next.

Configuration Details

This section is interesting because it can answer some interesting questions:

• When was the SQL Server started / restarted?
• What Edition of product are we running and version?
• If the instance is a Clustered instance or not.
• Number of logical processors used by the SQL Server instance.

When someone asks me to performance tune a system, I generally tend to ask some of these basic questions to customers. Lesser known to DBA is that instead of querying or relying on their Excel sheets, this report can give this information in an instant.

Most of the other values are self-explanatory. It should be noted that “Scheduler Agent Jobs” shows the number of jobs created, not what is running or enabled.

Non Default Configuration Options

Let us move to the next section. As an administrator, if you want to know the server level settings that were changed from default in a given instance, then this is the section to note.

By default the values are not visible. We need to click on (+) symbol to toggle it.

This part of the report can show various non-default configuration settings done via the executing sp_configure stored procedure. You can read about enabling / disabling sp_configure basics from my previous blog posts.

I always look into this section to see if the administrator or someone else in the system has limited the memory allocated to SQL Server on a given box. This comes under the “Max server memory(MB)” section as shown above.

This section also shows if any trace flag is enabled on the server. This information is normally not available when you just play around with sp_configure.

Activity Details

Next the busier part section with Activity Details come. This has a number of interesting information. A visual graph to show the CPU and IO performed on the instance. But most importantly there are sections on the top as a table which is worth a note.

1. Shows the number of Active sessions and transactions in the system at the moment.
2. Active databases available in the instance.
3. Total server memory in the system.
4. Logins connected to the server.
5. Number of blocked transactions in the system
6. Finally, worth to note is the server side traces running in the system.

Though the information is available in a nice report, the same can be got via various DMVs from SQL Server. I am outlining some of these for reference.

The query to generate the graph is shown below. This is based on historical data using sys.dm_exec_query_stats to show the graph for IO and CPU.

Query 1:

SELECT total_worker_time,
CASE WHEN DB_NAME(dbid) IS NULL THEN 'Adhoc Queries'
ELSE DB_NAME(dbid)
END AS DB_NAME,
dbid
FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats s1
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(sql_handle) AS s2

Query 2:

SELECT total_logical_reads + total_logical_writes AS total_io,
CASE WHEN DB_NAME(dbid) IS NULL THEN 'Adhoc Queries'
ELSE DB_NAME(dbid)
END AS DB_NAME
FROM sys.dm_exec_query_stats s1
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(sql_handle) AS s2

Though the reports are a great way to see this data visually, it is nice to see the power of DMVs and how they can be used with SQL Server. All these information are available out-of-box but these are visually represented nicely using the SQL Server Management studio dashboards.

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)