This T-SQL Tuesday is brought to us by Jens Vestergaard (b |  t), and we are asked to share our favorite SQL Server tools. Hint Profiler will not be on the list. But where do you start there are so many tools out there. In alphabetical order here are my top 5 tools because I can’t pick which one is better than other.

1. dbatools – contains a ton of commands to do just about anything with SQL Server, I am working on my first contribution to the project now. My favorite being able to copy logins between servers so the SIDs match on my availability groups.
2. Get-CMSHosts – This little function my coworker Mark Wilkinson (b | t) wrote, and it allows you to bring back a list of servers from your CMS server in PowerShell to run commands against or use a text file.  Check out his blog article on how to use it. He writes other cool stuff like a program that will space out your SQL Agent jobs, so that don’t overlap, that is on his blog as well.
3. sp_whoisactive – Who doesn’t like this script. We output this to a table every minute on systems that process 30,000 transactions per second so can analyze what was running later if needed.
4. Telegraf – I probably depend on this tool more than any other. Again thanks to Mark for working on this project to update for SQL Server 2016 and 2017.  I have a blog post on how to go about setting this up.  But it allows to capture all your performance metrics for you servers using all open source software and display them on interactive graphs.
5. VSCode – VSCode is much better for editing any code that you may need to modify from PowerShell to T-SQL to config files. It edits anything; if you haven’t used it yet, you are missing out.

I could have put at least 20 other tools in there, but I wanted to keep it short and just with things I use every day.