Microsoft SQL Server monitoring tools for optimized performance

SQL Server monitoring is continuous collection and analysis of usage, performance, and event metrics for Microsoft SQL Server. It’s the first step in optimizing performance for applications dependent on your data platform.

Highly effective monitoring gives a bird’s-eye view across your data estate. It also provides the deep analytics necessary to perform root cause analysis on the most challenging performance problems.

Baselines and historical data help measure and highlight performance trends. A comprehensive monitoring solution will also include extensive options for proactive alerting and automated remediation of familiar performance problems.

The most beneficial performance monitoring delivers the means to measure and improve SQL Server performance in one unified solution.

We cannot improve where we haven’t measured. Failing to monitor SQL Server performance often finds us unprepared when trying to solve urgent problems. Many performance challenges require replicating a scenario to pinpoint the root cause of a performance problem. Replicating a particular scenario from scratch is costly and might even prove to be impossible.

Your best defense against under-performing databases is monitoring your entire data platform stack. Monitoring should include from SQL Server and hypervisor hosts to stretch infrastructure in public, private, and hybrid cloud. What about analytics platforms such as SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)? Cloud platforms like Azure SQL Database and Amazon Web Services RDS for SQL Server are also a part of your overall data estate. All of these can be continuously monitored—and should be. If you’re only looking at full SQL Server instances, you have no visibility into other areas of your data platform.

SQL monitoring tools can provide alerts, troubleshooting help, and performance recommendations to help you resolve issues quicker, such as:

• Alerts: A comprehensive SQL monitor can allow you to stay up-to-date on issues affecting SQL performance with the ability to configure proactive alerts based on desired thresholds in capacity metrics, query time metrics, and performance.
• Troubleshooting: If SQL Server performance issues are due to inefficient queries, integrated performance analytics can help you better understand the granular details of SQL statements, wait types, SQL plans, and other factors in your query transmission. For other, non-query related issues, a tool can help you understand potential capacity and database performance trends, so you can more easily pinpoint the root cause of performance problems.
• Performance Recommendations: SQL Server monitoring tools can offer tuning recommendations to help improve database performance.

1. Reduce performance related incidents and outages.
   Performance related incidents can be costly to your business. Proactive SQL Server performance monitoring leads to fewer performance related issues and fewer tickets to resolve. Free your team to focus on optimizing overall data platform performance and supporting other lines of business rather than constantly fighting fires.
2. Lower infrastructure cost
   Maximize infrastructure investments by ensuring applications achieve the best possible performance within service and hardware boundaries. When you do need to upgrade cloud services or hardware, you can do so with confidence the decision won’t be wasteful.
3. Manage risk
   Continuously monitoring performance to help keep your data platform running smoothly reduces the risk of downtime. Downtime can cost your business heavily in lost productivity and can place the data platform team into a harmful reactive posture.

1. Too much data
   Too much data can leave you confused as you sift through mountains of irrelevant information. Your monitoring solution should provide rich and timely detail of actionable performance information.
2. Not enough detail
   Too little information leads to incorrect or incomplete conclusions, which can be expensive. Imagine investing large amounts of time and capital to solve a problem that was never truly a problem. Holistic performance monitoring gives you the full picture of performance, guiding you to accurate conclusions.
3. High observer overhead
   A monitoring engine creating too much overhead adds to your problem rather than helping solve it. It defeats the purpose of monitoring, forcing you to trade resources for visibility.
4. DIY solution technical debt
   DIY solutions cause ongoing maintenance headaches. Problems arise when you don’t remember who built the solution, or the person who built it can’t maintain it indefinitely. In many cases, the architect wasn’t an expert in performance monitoring, which can result in glaring functionality shortcomings.

Manually monitoring SQL Server can be tedious. You could spend hours each day gathering data from performance counters, event logs, and DMVs across potentially hundreds of servers and instances. This is before even considering how you might store and analyze historical information.

You’ll still need to format and present data in a logical and consumable fashion after collection. You now have even less time to solve real problems proactively.

DBAs who try to perform these tasks manually often abandon daily monitoring altogether.

The result is a perpetual cycle of reactive troubleshooting. This reactive stance reduces performance over the long term and can cost the business in lost revenue and productivity. Reactive posture places the data platform into an unpredictable state and forces DBAs to live with unyielding stress response.

Microsoft SQL Server monitoring tools with query analysis capabilities, automated incident responses, and other powerful features can help you quickly identify issues such as deadlocks, poorly written queries, and more. Reducing resolution time when problems arise can eliminate costly downtime and time-consuming troubleshooting. SQL Sentry allows you to monitor your data estate, analyze indexes, detect server blocks, and more, so you can tune queries and effectively optimize your database performance.

Additionally, the benefits of optimized SQL services can lead to more than just better database performance. Monitoring your server health can help build a more robust infrastructure that enhances business productivity, agility, and security.