Tag: Redgate Monitor

A customer wanted a report they could email to their boss about jobs, something that showed failures. This isn’t hard to get in Redgate Monitor, though it is manual (for now). Here’s how to do this.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts.

The Estate View of Jobs

Under the Estate menu item, there is an entry for jobs.

Click this and you get to the estate view of jobs. Here I see an overview, and I can click the scale in the upper right for day/week/month.

Below this I see the failed and successful job details, though only for the most recent execution. Otherwise this is a ton of data. Good to note that the 10 jobs that failed must have succeeded on a subsequent run.

There is a button to see the details. Click Export:

This downloads an Excel sheet of my jobs. There is a summary tab of the status with some details by day.

In the job details, I see the last run status for jobs. In this case, I don’t have any failed jobs (last run). However, I downloaded this earlier in the day, when I did have a job that failed in its more recent execution. Here’s what I see in the details if I scroll across. Look at the top line, which is the failure.

I can see the reason the job failed and the date/time.

If I were grabbing this every day, I’d have a nice report of how things are going. I would like to see a more detailed version of a report, and if you want it, please email sales@red-gate.com and request it.

Summary

Getting reports to share with others is important. As much as I’d just like to get people to look at the tool, I do understand having periodic reports. I used to self-generate these and store them off in a secure place. These were invaluable for auditors and kept them from asking me lots of questions.

You could do this as well, and Redgate Monitor makes it easy to get this info. Look for enhancements in this area in the future that might help you with estate level reports for your management (or auditors).

Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.

A customer was asking about how to track all the stored procedures that execute on their system. We have a section in Redgate Monitor that’s set to look at stored procedures, and you can easily find information about them.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts.

Finding Stored Procedures

If I go to the SQLServerCentral_Test system on monitor.red-gate.com, I can scroll down and see the top queries for the time period selected. Here’s an example of a query. The main query window shows SQL, but these are parts of procs.

If I expand to the full query, we see this is part of a proc. That’s good, in that if the query causing problems is part of a procedure, I can track that down.

However, what if I know people are reporting a problem that is related to this proc. Can I find it knowing the name? I can’t in the Top Queries.

However, we’ve added a Top procedures item to the right. That’s the place to focus on if you use stored procedures. And you should, since they create a looser coupling between your schema and the various business things your app needs to do.

On this test system, there are relatively few procedures running, but on many systems in production, this is a large list of things. To the right (not shown) there are various metrics that help you determine which of these items might be stressing your system because of execution counts, duration, CPU, etc.

If I know I have a procedure, I can search using the box. Here, I’m searching for UserA, but you might be searching for FinanceReport, hoping to find which of the FinanceReport_A, FinanceReport_B, FinanceRepot_Prep, etc. procs is using resources.

Expanding any of these (clicking the arrow) gives you more detail, as you would get in the Top Queries section.

Summary

Tracking down which queries are stressing your system and why can be hard. We added the focus on procedures as this is an easier way for some customers to determine what part of their workload is causing issues. In the top queries, sometimes procedures get lost, so this section lets you drill down into how your system is performing.

Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.

During a demo of Redgate Monitor Enterprise to a customer, they asked about how to search for permission changes. This post examines how you can do that in Redgate Monitor.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts.

Permission Changes

Redgate Monitor Enterprise adds a few security features to the tool that track things that organizations can struggle to track as their estates grow. There is a security menu item at the top of your Redgate Monitor web page. You can see this expanded on our demo system at monitor.red-gate.com.

Click the permission entry and you will see this starts on a page that is titled Permissions. There are a few tabs below the title (Permission changes, Servers, Databases, Users). We start on Permission changes, which helps us to see the various changes that have occurred.

Below this, we see a date box that is set for the last week, along with a few other items. By default we show you the last week’s worth of changes and all the data. However, you can easily alter this.

This can be a lot of data, especially in an enterprise, so perhaps I only want to see certain things. I can click “Columns and choose which data I care about. Here, I’ll uncheck a few boxes.

Notice this has rolled up some changes, so I don’t see quite as much as data as I do in the default view. This is useful when I want to see the “who had a change” and not every detail.

I can, of course, change the date range. We give you some quick defaults, or you can use the calendar picker to choose a range.

When I do this, I only see some changes, those that apply to that date range.

If I want to further filter things, I can choose that item. You can see the various items below I can choose from.

Let’s set  this to “Changed by” the sa account. When I do that, notice the “Filters” icon is annotated saying I have 1 filter condition. I also only see the one row changed by SA.

I will expand my date range and remove the filter while adding all the columns, and I see this data:

That’s a lot, but I can change the density. Here are the choices.

Here is compact. Now all 10 rows fit on the page:

Comfortable only shows 7 rows (9 in standard).

Lastly, I can set the number of rows on the page in the lower right.

Summary

Security is becoming something more people need to report on, especially public companies or those regulated. This feature of Redgate Monitor helps you satisfy auditor requests with the information they need to verify you are watching your systems.

Or, at least that you know Redgate Monitor is doing so.

Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.

One of the biggest challenges with monitoring data is managing the volume over time. Lots of bespoke/home-grown solutions don’t do this well, and some commercial products have a gross approach that might not meet your needs.

Customers constantly ask me about this, so here’s a quick tip on how you can manage data retention in Redgate Monitor.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts.

Checking the Configuration

As with most things in Redgate Monitor, this is a config item. In your Redgate Monitor solution (or on the public demo site), you can find the configuration gear icon in the upper right.

Click this and you get to the settings page. Scroll down to the Preferences area and there is a Data retention settings link. Click that.

You will get to the Data retention settings page (public site), which has a few sections at the top. You will be setting this per Base Monitor, using the drop down at the top.

Scroll below these to the data retention section, which you see at the bottom:

In this section, you see quite a few different sections. I’m showing the trend data below.

There are sections for

• trend data- long term data for understanding how performance and baselines work
• performance troubleshooting data – query, waits, plan, etc. data

Each of these sections is described, along with where the data is displayed. You can see that in the image above.

To the right of these, are the retention settings. I’ve got an image of the first few items. You can see the time for which to retain data and then the current size of that data.

You can set a fairly granular level of retention for data here, broken out by the various data elements we capture.

The choices for retention are shown below, including indefinitely (be careful of this one).

We have this documented, along with what we think are good defaults on this page. For example, we keep top query data for only one week, since this is a lot of data. However, if you want more time, then set it to something that works for you.

Summary

Data management is always a challenge, both in production databases and in our monitoring systems. Redgate Monitor gives you lots of choices, and those can vary by Base Monitor, so if you have a BM in the cloud doing some stuff and one on premise doing other things, you can set separate retention settings. That can be handy, especially when the cost of storing things can vary dramatically.

Watch this over time and adjust settings as needed to keep your system performing optimally.

Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.