Tag: Redgate Monitor

I learned something new recently. I can search in SQL Monitor for a database name, not just a server or instance name.

I tested this over at monitor.red-gate.com recently after a developer mentioned this feature. If you look at the Global Dashboard, there are a lot of machines. You can see 28 instances monitored, but many more databases.

If I were looking for the DatabaseWeekly database, I would need to know which instance this was hosted on. I do know, but someone in our IT support org might not.

However, if they start typing in the search box at the, the instances shrink. This is the top left box that has “Filter by name” in light text. If I type “database”, you can see fewer instances.

If I add the weekly, then you see there is a cluster of two machines that have this database.

If I pick one of these machines, I can see the databases with this name listed.

A handy little feature I knew nothing about.

Give this a try if you have SQL Monitor and save even more time digging into performance issues. If you don’t have SQL Monitor, download an eval today and give it a try.

SQL Monitor has improved a lot over the last couple of years. We have multiple teams building features and addressing issues, and each month when we have a readout of changes, I’m impressed. Since we update the produce every week or two, customers are seeing these enhancements regularly.

Recently I saw a demonstration of the alert filtering improvements and I wanted to share a few thoughts.

Lots of Alerts

If I go to monitor.red-gate.com, there are a lot of alerts raised across our test systems. While each individual card shows the current alerts, there are more behind the scenes. I’ll write about the cards another time, but in this post, let’s just look at the Alerts tab.

You can see in the image there are 24k+ alerts, and they are distributed across a variety of systems. The left side shows the groupings for databases and a count of alerts.  The main section of the screen shows lots of alert types listed, the source database, etc.

One thing I like is the use of color and visual cues. Above, most of these alerts are low level, and bordered on the left in blue. A mid level alert is shown here in yellow. This helps me to triage and decide what to do.

Filtering

While I can click on the server groups on the left and limit the views to a group (or a server), there are still a lot of alerts. The Production group shows 291 below.

The sm-dc2 shows 109 itself when selected.

One of the newer filtering options is that I can click the dropdown at the top of the screen for Alert Type and then limit what I see. The default is all alert types.

However, I can uncheck that and pick just one type, like Machine Unreachable.

Now I only see a couple of alerts.

I can also filter by the alert level, tags, a timeframe, alert property, or alert status.  All of this let me focus in on specific aspects of what might be wrong with a database. Using Filters is a good way to more quickly determine what might be happening on a database and how frequently I have these issues. From there, I can use my own skills and understanding of the database to determine what might be causing alerts to fire.

If you give SQL Monitor a try, I’m sure you’ll find it valuable for managing and monitoring your estate, helping you to quickly detect and respond to issues. Download an eval today and give it a try.

For many of us, we’ve learned over time that we need to filter out the amount of things that we deal with in an given situation. We certainly often do this in queries with a WHERE clause.

While plenty of software comes up with ways to group and filter items, often they are done in a way that doesn’t fit the needs to the user. An example of this is categories in SQL Monitor. They’re good, and people use them, but they aren’t enough. You can see the grouping/categories below from monitor.red-gate.com. The filter is at the top and the various cards are grouped under the three areas: Production, Azure database, and Staging.

That is a gross filter, but often customers might have multiple ways they want to filter servers, so we’ve added something new: tags.

In the demo system, there aren’t any set up yet, but you can see where these are added in the Monitored Servers configuration. You can create multiple tags for a database or select multiple databases and apply a tag to all of them.

On the Overview page, you can then quickly filter down by tags at the top. Just to the right of the groups.

Not a huge change, but it’s one that is requested a lot and it’s rolling out now to your SQL Monitor installs. Give it a try and as always, give us feedback on how it works.

If you haven’t tried SQL Monitor, download a trial and see how easy this makes monitoring your SQL Server databases.