Voice of the DBA

Tag: Redgate

Monday Monitor Tips: ServiceNow Integration

Earlier this year I visited a customer that was using the Redgate Monitor webhook to integrate with ServiceNow. However, they were also trying to integrate in a richer way to create incidents and a richer experience.

We took that as a bit of feedback and recently released native ServiceNow integration to allow updates to incidents as status changes. Automatically.

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

New Native Integration

Redgate Monitor originally only integrated natively with PagerDuty. Over time, we’ve add other ways to connect to other systems and send alerts or data to them. Slack and webhooks were available first , but recently we’ve changed.

If you click the gear icon in the upper right of Redgate Monitor, you’ll go to the configuration screen.

In here, look for the Notification settings. This likely as an “Improved” tag if you look at it in late 2025. Click this.

On the Notifications settings page, you see email settings at the top. Most customers configure this as email is still a great way to capture alerts and handle routing of info to a team.

If you scroll down then you see the other types of notifications. Slack has been there for some time, and if you click this, you see the details you can configure.

The new alert sinks are ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams. If I click the ServiceNow item, I see some details. I can enter my ServiceNow URL and the API key to connect. I can optionally also close an incident if the Alert ends. That’s always helpful.

Microsoft Teams is similar. Here I’m just sending messages, as I do in Slack. I can enter the URL, which would be for the location I want messages sent. I can optionally send a message when the Alert ends.

We still have the Webhook settings as well, so you can send to your orgs messaging system (Slack/Teams) and another location with a Webhook if you want. This might be useful for a different system or perhaps a dashboard where you are tracking information about databases.

Redgate Monitor has grown to add these new options to give you the flexibility you need to handle alerting staff about database issues.

Summary

Managing a large estate is hard, and it is incredibly helpful to have tools to organize, track, and share information. Redgate Monitor is a great platform for this, and with these new integrations, it can be used alongside existing tools to prevent you from missing any of those important alerts.

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.

November 10, 2025
The Book of Redgate: What Our Customers Say

This is from 2010, but I loved that people felt this way about Redgate Software. A lot of these words are things that we aim to express to each other and to customers.

Ingeniously Simple was a tagline that our founders aimed for with our first products. I still remember this and challenge developers to work towards this. However, I love these words being things that stand out: calm, dependable, Gold-Standard, Excellent, Trustworthy, even Love.

I have been proud to be a part of Redgate, and I want to ensure that customers not only get value from us for the money they spend, but that they want to, and like to, do business with us.

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.

November 7, 2025
Finding and Killing Blockers with Redgate AI Tech

Redgate has a research arm, called the Foundry, that has been experimenting with AIs and DBA tasks. This post shows how GenAI tech can be helpful to DBAs in finding blocking and removing the offending client.

This is part of a series of experiments with AI systems.

Redgate Runbooks

One of the experiments the Foundry is running is with something we’ve called Runbooks. Here’s the main screen, where I have a welcome and a chat window. This is like what I see in Claude.ai.

I have connected this to two instances in the settings, and given the tool permissions to run queries, but not execute commands. The first server is the Local 2022 Default and the second is the 2910-41433.

A Blocking Problem

I’m going to set up a blocking session with this code. Notice it opens a transaction and then performs an update.

In a second session, I’ll run this code. Notice this select is blocked and I have no results. The bottom shows this as “executing”.

Now I’ll go to the Runbooks and enter a question. In this case, I ask it what is wrong with my 2022 server, as if someone called me and said there was an issue. Imagine the “Select” query owner wondering why things aren’t returning right away.

The Redgate Runbook responds by saying it needs to run something. The first time, it asks me to approve this, which I did. Then it runs it and shows executed.

Below this I get some results of what’s returned. This isn’t different than SP_who2, but if you’ve used that tool, you often get a lot of system stuff. I Could use sp_whoisactive, but again, more results than I want without knowing anything. Here the Runbook as limited results to what I care about.

What’s more, the Runbook then tells me something about what it analyzes. This isn’t perfect, but it’s been better than what a lot of help desk/first line support people have told me.

If I know who 56 is, certainly I can ask them to close their tran. This isn’t perfect, but I can ask the Runbook to do this, as I do at the bottom of the image above.

It again asks me to run something, and when it does, I see the executed note.

If I go back to SSMS, I see the query completed.

I typically might not kill the session without more research. I could have asked for what this is, which I’ll do now for the 57 (blocked) session. What was running here? (since 56 was killed)

Again, I approve this and get results.

To me, that’s pretty cool. Using AI to help me get things done as a lever, rather than a replacement is useful. I could have set the AI checking while I finished another task, or used Slack/Teams to check with others as a troubleshoot. I could certainly let the AI run, but I want approvals. I could copy/paste the code to a tool to run it, but the AI let’s this run separately, while I could be multi-tasking with a phone call to the user, or to the help desk, or anything else. More importantly, if I had this AI working from a mobile phone (jump box, etc.) I could be doing minimal typing and have the tech working for me.

This isn’t a product, and unlikely to be one in its own right, but this is the type of thinking we do at Redgate. Harness AI, in a safe way, that’s useful.

And ingeniously simple.

Tom Hodgson runs the group that worked on this, and he have me a fun, unforgettable interview. You can watch here: https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/podcasts/coffee-chat-with-tom-hodgson/

Video Walkthrough

Watch this live

November 5, 2025
SQL Clone at Scale with Striped Backups

I had a customer recently reach out to ask if SQL Clone would work with 20 backup files. I decided to test this.

This is part of a series of posts on SQL Clone, which is a virtualization product from Redgate Software.

The Scenario

A customer asked about SQL Clone working with a lot of backup files (striped), like 20. Our support org said this should work and handle the max number of files, which is 64 for the backup command.

I know SQL Clone works with striped backups because I wrote an article on it, but I only tested 7 files. How to test more than that?

First, get the backups. To do this, I used a GenAI to quickly get me a command. Once I had this, I ran it and got a lot of files.

Now to get the SQL Clone image.

Image Creation

I decided to start with the GUI. This has changed since I wrote the article in that it now puts each file in a separate text box. By default you get two. I pasted in my file path and file, and then copy/pasted in the 2nd box. I continued adding them, clicking the “Add another file” at the bottom each time (see the image).

It was tedious, but it was a quick way of testing this. I likely would have taken longer than the 3-4 minutes of copy/pasting to write a PoSh script (though I need to do that). You can see most of my files below.

Once I had 32 of them, I clicked “Continue” and entered the name and location for my image. Then clicked “Create”.

It worked. The image shows my SQL Clone image being created successfully and a clone from this image.

These were small files, so the restore time was quick. Each is about 3MB, so we’re not looking at much.

Summary

This shows that SQL Clone can work with 32 files. I assume it works with 64, but that will have to wait until I have time to mess around with the PoSh to make the image command creation easy.

If you are looking to save storage space for multiple copies of databases, or give each user a consistent copy in seconds, check out SQL Clone.

Video Walkthrough

See this article in video below.

October 27, 2025