A customer was asking about what certain items in Redgate Monitor mean. They have a variety of skills on their staff, and they have developers accessing Redgate Monitor. This post explains how your staff can start to learn a bit more about SQL Server as they use the tool.
There are lots of little tips and documentation available in Redgate Monitor. These have been added with various references to help you learn more about the data collected by Redgate Monitor, as well as assist you in tuning your system for optimal performance.
For example, there is an Impact column when I look at a server and see the queries that have run. Next to this is a question mark in a blue circle. Clicking this lets me learn about what this column is and how it is calculated.
Similary, if I didn’t know what a Logical Write was, I can click this item and see where the data comes from. I also get a link to the Microsoft documentation at the bottom.
If I want to see actual plans rather than estimated ones, I have a link by the details of a query that sends me to the Redgate Monitor docs.
Below this I see waits that are significant. Next to the wait description, I can learn about what this wait means.
If I click this, I get a long description of what this is and where I might look to investigate this or fix it.
In the Alerts section, there is a description tab for each Alert. If you check this, it explains what this alert is, when it is raised, and potential reasons. Here is the Disk Space alert description
Here is the one for Job Failures.
If you are analyzing metrics, we give more details when you select a metric in the Analysis tab. This is handy if here are metrics you don’t understand and want more information without spending time Googling or asking an AI.
We even have some guidance in the Estate tabs, such as this tooltip on the License Req column. We let you know what we are showing and why, and a link to guidance from Microsoft.
Summary
This post shows some of the places where you can learn more about how Redgate Monitor works, or how you should use the data displayed. There are many more places inside the product where you get assistance that helps you get the most out of your monitoring solution.
SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and other platforms have become very complex. Redgate Monitor tries to help simplify your workload by giving you a single pane of glass across the cloud, different platforms, and different environments, but it can be hard for anyone to manage an estate.
This post gives you an idea of how Redgate Monitor tries to help you learn, or reminds you, of what you’re seeing.
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.
I was looking back at my year and decided to see if SQL Prompt could help me with some analysis. I was pleasantly surprised by how this went. This post looks at my experience using this to help me write a few queries.
This year was a big one for me and New York City. By my count, I went there five times. I wanted to see if that was right.
I started by loading up a bunch of travel data I keep into a database. I do this to keep an eye on where/when I’m going places, so that I have a few of how busy I’ll be. In this case, I loaded data into a table. Here’s a short sample of data.
I started by asking Prompt AI to write me a query. Here’s the prompt:
Simple enough. I could have written what it gave me, so I asked for more. Since I’m not tracking trips, but where I am on days, I needed something better. My prompt is what I might express to someone else, non-continuous trips.
I got a 4 back from more complex code, which is looking for entries with the city being NYC or a variant. It then adds a LAG(), which is what I was thinking before I decided to let Prompt do this. Notice above I was already asking for dates.
I got my dates, but still 4 trips. I know I flew to the NYC area more times. In looking at the dates, I realized that one of the trips, Mar 31-Apr 2, was only to Jersey City. So I had asked for that above.
You can see more more complex code, which adds in New Jersey. The results were interesting. This has 6 trips, because on one another trip, I went to New Jersey for a day. I had forgotten that one.
Checking Countries
I wanted to do some country analysis. I knew there was a bunch of country data from 2025 in there, so I wrote a simple query. That gets me some data, but it’s a bit of a mess. I really want to know when I visited countries.
I used PromptAI with a simple request.
I got some results back, which were good, but included the USA. I then asked to remove this and you see the result.
This was a good query, overall, so I clicked the “Optimize SQL” button. I got these items added as comments.
There isn’t a lot to do here, but I created the index. The “optimize” had also added a FORCESEEK, which I didn’t realize at first, so I removed it.
Eventually I added back the USA, partially as this improves performance, but also, with the results, I got a good look at travel patterns. In this case, I can see when I’m in the USA and when I’m not. I liked that I had asked for the trip duration, but the GenAI also added days traveling on the trips, which was fascinating.
The final query is here:
;WITH TravelCTE
AS (SELECT Country,
TravelDate,
DaySpentTraveling,
ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY Country ORDER BY TravelDate) AS RowNum
FROM dbo.Travel WITH (INDEX = IX_Travel_YearCountry) -- Use existing index to improve performance
WHERE TravelDate >= '20250101' -- Using efficient date literal format
)
SELECT t.Country,
t.TripStartDate,
t.TripEndDate,
t.TripDuration,
t.TotalDaysSpentTraveling
FROM
(
SELECT Country,
MIN(TravelDate) AS TripStartDate,
MAX(TravelDate) AS TripEndDate,
DATEDIFF(DAY, MIN(TravelDate), MAX(TravelDate)) + 1 AS TripDuration,
SUM(DaySpentTraveling) AS TotalDaysSpentTraveling,
DATEADD(DAY, -RowNum, TravelDate) AS GroupingKey
FROM TravelCTE
GROUP BY Country,
DATEADD(DAY, -RowNum, TravelDate)
) AS t
ORDER BY t.TripStartDate;
Summary
This was an interesting experiment in having an AI help me do some data analysis. I could have written these queries, but it would definitely have taken me as long as it took to ask the AI and write this post to do so. I’d be messing with data, double checking myself, and trying to decide what I wanted.
I also found it interesting to have the AI write the code and I could think more about the data being returned. I found a few data anomalies that I corrected along the way.
Prompt AI is proving useful, though when I was going back and forth a lot, I got this message.
This was Redgate in 2010, spread across the globe. First the EU/US
Here’s Asia
I miss Brad. I enjoyed traveling around and working with him. I’d forgotten about Bob until I looked at this.
At this point, we had 200-ish people in Cambridge, UK and no US office. Just Brad, Bob, and me there.
We also had the major events. Pass Summit and SQL Bits still exist. The PDC, TechEd, and PASS Europe are gone.
Amazing to think how the world changed, both for Redgate as a company and as individuals. We’ve grown so much since then.
I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.
A customer was asking about tracking logins and logouts in Redgate Monitor. We don’t do this natively, as this really needs an XEvent session. I decided to see if an AI could help me get a solution setup that might let me build a custom metric to track this.
I could do this myself, but it’s some looking syntax and capabilities, futzing with different code items, and trying to think about options. The goal here is can an AI help and save time. Not do the work for me, but assist.
So maybe not Vibe coding per se, but felt like I did little.
Note: This isn’t something I necessarily worry about. The rate might tell me if I’m under attack, but I’d hope applications would detect this first (and be able to block things)
The Problem
The customer just asked if they could track logins and logouts. I mentioned the Server Properties (shown below), to see what they’d done. They hadn’t used this, but also, it’s not very flexible or reportable as it puts info in the error log.
Tracking this info really requires an XE (Extended Events) session. That’s a lightweight way to capture this information. If I want to capture some info about the client logging in, or failing to log in, that’s the way.
A separate request was could we also get logouts. The only way to do this is with an XE session and the sqlserver.logout event.
With that in mind, let’s see how my assistant can help.
Using Claude
I opened Claude and asked this: “in sql server can I track login counts and logout counts from t-sql?” and actually spelled everything correctly. No savings here.
The base answer I got started like this, giving me a few options.
The ending asked me if I’d like to get the Extended Event option. It had provided only the login trigger option. I need an assistant, so I said yes.
That first answer was maybe 20-30 sec, but I started reading things, so this felt like a discussion with another DBA. Once this started, I let it go and it started to write out and work on code on the right, and then fill in the results on the left. This was a few minutes, so I flipped over to answer a few emails while I saw this on another monitor.
The results started with a table to store data and then an XE session. The whole page looks like this, which is a lot.
Here’s the full left side. Notice that it asks me for a next step. I’ve met a lot of junior DBAs, or even Senior-DBAs-with-1-year-of-experience-10-times that didn’t do this.
The actual code doesn’t matter yet, since I realized this isn’t getting failed logins. I asked another question and got a response. A polite Claude complements me and then rewrites code. This took another few minutes, and it was neat to see it rewriting its code on the right, adding in a new field in the table and adjusting the session.
I watched a bit, but got distracted with a Slack message. One nice thing is I can move on to another task while my assistant keeps working.
At the bottom, I liked the summary of how it works.
My Slack message was from an AE, asking a question about the server property stuff (from the customer). I could have typed a bunch, but when I looked back, Claude was finished, so I asked it.
I copy/pasted this to the AE, as it’s a good summary for the customer. This assistant is making my job easier.
Testing the Solution
I didn’t just send this. Instead I decided to test this on a few local systems. I keep a DBA database on each instance, so I ran the code in there to create the table and session. As a precaution, since this isn’t my code, I ran each item separately.
The table worked here. I had another window for the session, which I looked over, but didn’t extensively check. I’m not an XE expert, and I’d likely fumble this code worse than an AI at first, so I checked the events and actions. I decided to just run this since it looked good.
When it came to the procedure, I got an error. I copied and pasted this into Claude. It recognized an issue and fixed it. This took a few minutes, but this is faster than I could have corrected my own amateurly written query against XE.
Now I had a procedure. One thing I edited in both the session and proc is that I removed the hard coded c:\SQLData path. I wanted this captured with my other instance stuff in the \logs folder, so I left just the name of the XE session.
Adding Archival
One of the things that Redgate Monitor does really well is manage older data. I’ve seen so many people, including myself, set up something like this and then a year later realize they’ve captured GB of data.
I asked Claude to just fix this for me.
I grabbed the second command for my Agent Job and changed 180 to 90.
SQL Agent Job
Claude again asked me above about jobs, but jobs are simple and easy, and I wanted to think about it for a minute. I right clicked and created a new job. I thought about the name and description I wanted. Then I made two steps, pasting in two exec proc commands for the procs my assistant had written.
The last thing was some testing. I ran my job to be sure it was working. It completed, which was good.
I made a few logins and logouts, including a few failed logins. Then I queried my table. I didn’t remember the name, but my assistant tends to pick plain/boring names. So I used SQL Prompt to find it with a ssf <tab> l and got this:
When I got a query and checked, I see logs of my logins and logouts.
Redgate Monitor Custom Metric
My AE and customer wanted to see this in Redgate Monitor, so I decided to ask Claude. It was happy to help.
I could repeat that for the other items (failed logins and logouts). I didn’t, but this gets me ready to add this to Redgate Monitor.
Summary
This shows how an AI assistant can help me set up some auditing for security purposes. There is nothing complex here, and I’ve set up a bunch of this myself in the past. I even have a blog on this.
However, the code is cumbersome and slow to write for me. Or most humans unless you end up working with XE every day. Even if you use SSMS and the GUI to generate the script, it can be slow. I know I’d certainly have to look things up. In less than 15 minutes, I had a fairly well working solution, with archiving (deleting) old data and I didn’t need to focus tightly the entire time or type a lot. I did some other work, and I could focus on just testing.
Claude was a great AI assistant to this problem, which is similar to a lot of DBA-type work I’ve done in the past.
I tried Google Gemini and ChatGPT. A quick summary of those, which didn’t work as well. At least not to me.
Note that I use the free versions for all of these tools right now.
Gemini
The first prompt got me just a table and trigger, with a followup if I wanted more. I asked about XE and got a basic session, not as easy to read as Claude and embedded inside the response. It also had fewer actions.
I got to the same place, but it was more prompts and I had to keep guiding it along, like micro, or at least mini, managing another DBA. On the plus side, this was faster.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT suggested a trigger, but noted this wasn’t great. It did suggest extended events, and a complete solution. I could have just entered “yes”, but I didn’t. I’m still working on muscle memory at times.
I got each part of the solution separate, but this has me scrolling through explanation and code. Again, I prefer the Claude side-by-side approach, but this works. And it’s fast.
This also kept leading me along the process, which I liked. It certainly likes the checkboxes and Xs in its results.
Both tools helped me with custom metrics.
Video Walkthrough
Here is a a retry, and then showing the first solution. I think Claude learned a bit the second time.
