I’ll admit, I’m a lot more comfortable with tracing and the profiler than I am with EE (extended events) and the viewer. It’s something I really want to get past but haven’t yet. Now, if you like tracing and profiler that’s just fine. They were around for a long time and a lot of people are quite comfortable with them. That said, I’d recommend trying to get used to EE. All of the new events are coming in EE. Want to find out information about an Availability Group? Use EE. etc. (Of course distributed replay still uses trace files. ¯_(?)_/¯ )
So the whole point of this post is to share a video with you.
Grant Fritchey (blog|twitter) mentioned a Youtube video that he’d done.
While it doesn’t go into a great amount of detail on creating new EE sessions (although I did learn a few things) it does go into detail on the viewer. Since that’s always been one of my sticking points I found this incredibly helpful. He demonstrates things like changing the display format, filtering, grouping, sorting, etc. (Even opening saved data!)
This is a must watch if you are still uncomfortable with EE. Yea, I still have a lot of work to do getting comfortable with creating new sessions. What’s available and where to find it for example. But that’s going to be practice, practice, practice.