My primary responsibility is to help people with SQL Server Performance Tuning and Optimization, and I believe there are three important challenges any DBA faces. Today we will discuss why I prefer to use Spotlight to identify SQL Server Performance issues and their resolutions.
Let us see how spotlight helps DBA to resolve 3 of the biggest challenges.
Root Cause Analysis
As per Wikipedia Root cause analysis (RCA) is a method of problem-solving used for identifying the root causes of faults or problems. It is very critical that during RCA the performance is properly documented and the proper timeline is established. DBAs often have trouble to identify if the performance alert which they are experiencing is due to causal factor or due to some abnormal factors.
When DBA’s are facing challenges to identify the RCA for their performance issues, they can take help of Spotlight’s powerful root cause analysis feature. It creates multiple diagnostic workflows, including detailed wait stat/workload analysis and deadlock detection, with over 70 diagnostic drilldowns. Additionally, it recognizes some to correctly deal with the root cause of any diagnostic challenge.
24×7 SQL Server Monitoring and Diagnostics
Ask any DBA what would they love to monitor in their SQL Server and I promise you that you will get quite many different answers to this question. Though every DBA would love to see their server always up upon asked what exactly they would like to watch you will see different answers to the popular question.
This is exactly where I believe that Spotlight can help us. It establishes around-the-clock, agentless monitoring from a centralized diagnostic server for a single view across multiple clients, with alarms and notifications when performance deviates from pre-set operating thresholds. Please pay attention to the word agent-less, yeah that is correct, that makes it more flexible and easy to implement the monitoring.
History, Trends, Reports and Collective Intelligence
Just two weeks ago, at the mid-night I got a call from the old friend, he called me to for urgent help. The server where my friends were hosting had crashed and their backup recovery server was not coming up. This lead to a very critical sad situation, where eventually we just had to rebuild the servers by restoring backups.
After we got up the server in a long way, I was talking to my friend to know what he and his organization could have done to improve the server performance. Both of us agreed that if he has watched the historical trend of the server along with the collective intelligence, he could have got the early warning and avoided the situation. If you are a user of Spotlight, you can always get a holistic view of the health of your system and benchmark results with other users.
Next Action
With Spotlight, you can proactively manage your SQL Server environment by viewing the health of all of your SQL Server instances on a single screen, anytime, anywhere on any device.
Try out the Spotlight Free Trial.
Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)
