Voice of the DBA

Tag: monitoring

  • Watch the State of SQL Server Monitoring tomorrow

    Tomorrow Redgate is running a webinar on the State of SQL Server Monitoring with Grant, Chris Yates, Annette Allen, and Tony Maddonna. You can register now and attend on June 25, at 4pm BST/11am EDT/8am PDT.

    What has Redgate’s latest survey revealed about the state of SQL Server monitoring in 2019? Each year we contract for a survey on monitoring and produce a report (similar to and in addition to the State of Database DevOps). This is the only industry report to benchmark monitoring in the SQL Server community, now in its second year.

    Join our panel of SQL Server experts as they discuss the key findings of our industry-leading report, that includes insights such as:

    • Getting to grips with growing estates
    • Issues caused by migrations
    • Which tooling is being used
    • Staying on top of multiple database systems
    • What is the next big challenge facing the industry.

    The report has data from over 800 participants across a range of sectors and from all around the globe. The key findings include: Estates are continuing to grow, migrations is predicted to be the biggest challenge facing database professionals this year, adoption of cloud technologies is increasing and Redgate’s SQL Monitor is the most popular third-party tool (even when we remove out customer base).

    The report will be available after the 25th June. Look for a link, or attend the webinar and we’ll send you the link.

    Register today.

  • An Alert Philosophy

    Many of you reading this will be responsible in some way for managing a system. This might be a test/development system or a production one, but often you want to know how well the system is working. Or maybe you want to know if the system is working at all. Even developers care if their server is up.

    There are plenty of ways to get information about a server. Some of us monitor in an automated fashion, some of us check when we think something is wrong, but no matter what you do, you are often looking for some data about the state of the system. When the system lets you know automatically, this is what we call an alert, though getting the alert because you can’t connect and the system is down might not be the best type of alert.

    I’ve managed lots of production systems, and usually have implemented some sort of process to let me know when things happen. These could be good or bad things, or just things, but they are alerts that I can about. They provide me with information that I will use in some manner to make a decision. In other words, some sort of human decision and response is needed here.

    A alert should be something that calls for action, or at least, that’s what Google thinks. This short piece contains information Google’s SRE work. Their definition of an alert is something a system (not a user) generates and something that requires human action, not automated responses. The article talks about good alerts and hierarchies of alerts, and more. Everyone has their own method of picking and configuring alerts, but you should think about what interruptions you need, and what sort of timeliness is required from a human.

    Personally, I decide if an alert requires immediate action and if so, then the alert needs to hit my device (phone, pager, fax machine, wife’s mobile, whatever). That way I can make a decision to actually deal with the situation or pawn it off on Kendra or Grant. Those are real time decisions and there ought to be few of those in any system.

    If it’s not something I need to fix now, then it can be filed in email or as a lower priority item in my monitoring software. Those items need to be alerts and not logs because I only look at logs when I’m really confused and can’t fix something. The low level alerts are things like I’m running low on disk space for a system and will run out in 30 days. That’s not something I break away from a date with my wife for, but it is something I want to start thinking about if there’s a lead time to make changes.

    No matter how you view alerts, it does pay to think about them and try to reduce the number and frequency of alerts that hit your administrators. That might be configuring your monitoring differently, it might mean adding resources, or it might mean fixing broken software. We can burn out people as well as customers with constant breakage, so fix those things that are worth alerts.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn.

  • What’s the State of SQL Server Monitoring?

    You can help everyone understand how people monitor and manage their instances. Redgate is prepping the 2019 State of SQL Server Monitoring report and we’re asking people to share some data on what they monitor today.

    Take our survey today (closes Apr 5)

    We publish this information, so it’s not something that just Redgate looks at. You can get last year’s report here, which lots of you have downloaded. The data in here can help you understand if you’re doing a good job with your SQL Server estate and perhaps give you a few things to think about that might help you do a better job.

    If you have a few minutes, and you’d like to win an Amazon US$250GC, take the survey. You’ve got a week, but take 5 minutes today and think about your monitoring process and applications and answer a few questions.

  • Do You Have a SQL Server Estate?

    At Redgate, we do a lot of research. Maybe not as much as Microsoft Research, but we are always trying to investigate more about customer problems and challenges before we build or change software.

    Take our survey on SQL Server Configuration Management and you could win prizes. Or a prize.

    I’ve never thought about managing an estate, but not that I live on a horse ranch, that has a little more meaning. In the past, I’ve managed hundreds of instances and thousands of databases. That’s certainly an estate, but even when I had 5 servers, that is something of a small estate of things to keep me busy.

    At Redgate, we know there are lots of challenges in managing SQL Servers. We constantly have a team of people working on SQL Monitor, and they are releasing changes every week or two. In fact, we just released v9.0 this year, full of enhancements customers have asked for.

    In addition to the tactical team that’s building and fixing things day to day, we are doing future research into where to take our monitoring and tuning software. That’s some of what this survey is about. Let us know about which things might help you smooth the process of managing systems.

    Give us a few minutes and a little information and take our survey. You might find that a future version of SQL Monitor contains something you thought would be useful.

    Take the Survey today.