Today I am starting a week-long series where I will be discussing various SQL Server Monitoring Tools. My primary aim is to help people with my consulting workshop Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check. While I help customers with their various SQL Server performance issues, I often see them struggling to monitor their SQL Server’s health. One of the primary discussions at the end of the consultation is about which tool is the best for their situation and how it can prevent them from encountering more trouble in the future. Today we will briefly talk about SQL Diagnostic Manager (SQLDM).
Bottlenecks and Alerts
Whenever we look at any slow queries, the first question that comes to mind is ‘what is slowing it down?’ If we know the answer, we know how to solve the issue but quite often we are not aware of the root cause of the issue. I really love software or tools that alert me if there are any bottlenecks. This is where I really appreciate SQL Diagnostic Manager (SQLDM) for its proactive behavior around bottlenecks and alerts. Additionally, SQLDM is not only working on this premise but it also helps you to troubleshoot your issues on the cloud.
My Top 3 Favorites of SQL Diagnostic Manager
There are many reasons for liking this tool, however, I would love to expand on 3 of the reasons I like it.
Reason 1: Resolve Query and Resource Bottlenecks
If I have one query, I can easily find out the bottleneck for it but when I have multiple queries running together, it is almost impossible to identify the impact of each of the query on the available resource bottlenecks. There are a lot of situations where we see queries running in parallel, and one query that works fine in isolation will create trouble for another one when they are running together. This is where I really love SQLDM as it does a great job of listing queries and bottlenecks.
Reason 2: Multiple Baselines and Capacity Planning
There is a single solution to solve every problem out there. There are situations when one parameter is good for one part of the system, there is a totally different value when the same parameter is good for a different part of the system. It is important to define a different baseline for each part of your application and critical to compare each of them to find out which one works the best. Various charges and reports analyzing trends and forecasts of metrics help DBAs to plan for future capacity needs.
Reason 3: Manage Availability Groups
Availability groups are a complex subject. I often see organizations struggling with the health of their system when they have high availability configured or AlwaysOn Deployed. I really love the feature in SQLDM where it manages the topology of high availability groups, monitors and alerts on clusters, mirrors, and replication to safeguard during failover.
When SQLDM is Best For You?
If your organizations have deployments of SQL Server on different platforms such as on-premise on physical and virtual machines, in the private, public, and government cloud on virtual machines, and in the public and government cloud as managed databases, you may want to invest in a single tool to monitor the performances. This is the time when you want to invest in one robust tool like SQLDM, which can help you to identify your resource bottleneck and alert you proactively.
Call to Action
SQL Diagnostic Manager is an amazing tool to identify and solve SQL Server performance issues.
I strongly suggest you Try out SQL Diagnostic Manager.
While you explore, SQL Diagnostic Manager, I suggest you should also check out ER Studio and SQL Doctor.
Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)
