May 14, 2019 at 5:37 pm
I just took over 45 instances as our DBA (at least I think I've found them all!) That will probably be down to around 30 by the end of the year. I am looking for true dashboard monitoring. If a light is on something bad is going on that I need to fix now (e.g. up/down, deadlocks, failed jobs, etc.) We have the SAM product by Solarwinds, but it feels really cumbersome, support isn't that great and the community isn't very active. I'm supposed to talk with Redgate toward the end of the week but concerned it will be way out of budget. One other note: This is mostly proprietary software so I don't have liberty to modify table structure, procedures, etc.
What would you all recommend for me? Also, any pro tips on trying to get budget for this?
May 15, 2019 at 8:02 am
So, I work for Redgate. Take anything else I say with that in mind.
The whole purpose for purchasing a monitoring tool is to buy time. We're literally not doing anything you can't do for yourself. You can easily set up mechanisms using Extended Events, the Dynamic Management Views (DMV), Windows Management Interface (WMI), and Performance Monitor (PerfMon). There are all sorts of examples for each of these tools online. Combine them with SQL Agent jobs, some PowerShell scripts and a bunch of reports, and you can readily replicate a lot of the work done by any 3rd party monitoring tool (although maybe not all, we have some pretty good developers). It just takes a bunch of labor and time. A monitoring tool is just the collection of years of work by a collection of developers that you can buy. Yeah, they might seem a bit expensive (BTW, Redgate is probably one of, if not THE, least expensive monitoring tools), but when you look at just the amount of your time that they save, suddenly the cost is vanishingly small. Instead of spending time building monitoring for the server, you're spending time tuning it, automating it, or something else.
This is my opinion of monitoring tools in general. Deciding exactly which tool to use, there, I have prejudices, clearly.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
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Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
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May 15, 2019 at 8:37 am
take a look
https://sqlpadre.wordpress.com/2014/02/06/sql-copilota-software-review/
PS http://www.sqlcopilot.com can't be resolved now, unfortunatelly. Perhaps some temporary issues ...
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