August 27, 2010 at 5:49 am
Hi,
I am considering buying a tool to monitor all my sql servers.
I tested 4 different tool.
Idera: Tool for SQL Server
Red-gate: Tool for SQL Server
SQL Sentry: Performance and Event Managers
Quest: Spotlight
Personelly I was very impressed with Spotlight because it was so very graphic and works with different colour levels.
I'm interested in hearing your experience with them.
Thank you.
Vera
August 27, 2010 at 7:06 am
even I use the spotlight and its quiet handy for digging into the problem. But sometime it takes ages to respond. Hope new version 7.0 have improved in responding.
Also Performance Analysis is also good tool but same hanging problem is there.
These tool I think is helpful when you totally not able to find anything using sql server activity monitor in 2008.
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Ashish
August 27, 2010 at 9:25 am
I used Spotlight for years and up until v7, it was the best tool I'd ever used for historical troubleshooting (24x7 monitoring even when no admins are connected in the Enterprise edition) on 100's of instances.
v7 brought some performance problems for me. The diagnostic service seemed to need more power (and it's own server in fact) when they removed the local database from each monitored target and went "agentless", if you will.
Another thing to watch is the amount of disk space all that historical playback and repository data will require. I also found that in v7 they modified the way the optimizations were handled for the playback and repository DBs. I often found that those two databases would grow extremely large overnight, and my assumption (never had time to prove it) was that they were rebuilding indexes on that primary fact table instead of dropping and recreating them. So I'd end up with 120GB+ DBs when there was only about 70-80Gb of data and 50% free space.
Anyway, it's not cheap, but it is a great tool and really can be a time saver and neat to look at.
We'd tried out Idera's Diagnostic Manager and it just never had the UI that appealed to me and felt like I was clicking too much to find a root cause, if I ever found it.
Another option is to leverage SQL Server 2008's Management Data Warehouse and Data Collection.....(that's what I'm using where I am now because I don't have the budget for tools or sheer number of servers to monitor).
In the end, if you can afford it, Spotlight is the best of breed IMHO.
HTH,
-Patrick
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