When you are using the extended event to capture some data for troubleshooting purpose, you may want to start or stop it at a specific time. Unfortunately, the Extended Event feature doesn’t provide you the option to schedule it. But, it can easily be accomplished by using “ALTER EVENT SESSION” T-SQL code and SQL Server Agent. You can use the below syntax to start and stop the xEvent session;

ALTER EVENT SESSION event_session_name ON SERVER STATE = {START | STOP}

Demonstration:

To demonstrate it, I have created an extended event session “SP_Performance” on the server which is going to capture the provided stored procedure execution duration by the statements.

I know from the application team that the SP performance goes worst especially in the evening time so I am going to create an SQL Agent Job to start it at 3 PM and another SQL Job to stop it at 6 PM.

The first job has one step, which issues the START command.

My second job is to stop the session. There is one step, which issues the STOP command.

Here is schedules detail of the jobs;

Hope, you enjoyed learning of how you can schedule the timing of xEvent sessions.

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