Recently, I wrote an article about COVID-19, Working From Home and Performance Tuning and I got lots of great responses to it. While it is fun to engage with kids and family there are times when we have to manage our jobs. Lots of DBA and Developers who were actively working on new development projects, suddenly realized that their job changed a bit. From developing the new project suddenly most SQL Experts (DBAs and Devs) have to start remote monitoring while working from home.
Monitoring Challenges
Every DBA when they start setting up monitoring for the remote system, the issue which they face is what to monitor in SQL Server. There are so many different aspects of the SQL Server that it becomes pretty impossible to monitor every single aspect all the time. However, if you ask any experienced SQL Server Troubleshooters they will say it is very critical to monitor the following three aspects in any SQL Server.
Workload Analysis / Resource Consumption Monitoring
It is very critical to keep an eye out of your current workload and available resources. The fine balance between both of them will keep your SQL Server healthy otherwise, you will start struggling with a performance of start over providing the resources which is also a waste of fortune.
Incident Playback / Root Cause Analysis
Root cause analysis (RCA) is something I am often hired to investigate. By default SQL Server does not collect all the data to investigate the performance slowness at any point in time. There are few DMVs when we query them they do provide some meaningful data but if due to Server slowness the server had to be restarted, we even lose most of the trace data.
If you want to know what went wrong last time and do proper root cause analysis, you need to have an incident playback feature.
Proactive Monitoring Alert
For any system when things are running fine, no one is often worried. However, when suddenly there are changes in the workload or anything out of normal happens, we need to know immediately. It is critical to know that our system is going to hit the performance bottleneck due to resource unavailability. Proactive monitoring is a good thing but it should be free from false positive.
Call to Action – Remote Monitoring
Here are three calls to action valid till April 17, 2020.
Call to Action 1: Download Spotlight Enterprise and Enter to Win three USD 100
Call to Action 2: Download Spotlight Cloud for Free Performance Monitoring
Call to Action 3: If you have done both action 1 and action 2, just drop the screenshot to pinal @ sqlauthority.com and one of you may win SQL Server Performance Tuning Practical Workshop – Recorded Classes
Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com)
First appeared on SQL SERVER – Remote Monitoring While Working from Home