I had a customer that was concerned about the fragmentation alert for indexes and wanted to know how to change it. This post discusses the change.
This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts
Finding Alert Configuration
The settings for Redgate Monitor are available with the gear icon in the upper right side the menu area. You can see this below.
Click this to get a list of settings. The second section below has the alert settings, which you can see here. Click this.
This brings up a long list of alerts that are a part of Redgate Monitor. Scroll down a bit and you will see a fragmented indexes alert.
If you click this, you may see this, as the alert is disabled. This has not proven to be a very useful alert for most organizations, so it’s off. However, you can click the “customize” radio button.
When you do this, you should then see the alert settings. This is defaulting to all your servers, but you can customize the level of alerting by clicking on the left side to a server or group. I’ll cover that in another post.
The key things here are that you can exclude read-only databases, as the fragmentation won’t change. Below that, you see there is a medium alert specified at a default of 60%. You can change the low/med/hi with the drop down as well as the percentage in the spinner.
If you want more than one alert, flip the “Use multiple alert threshholds” button and you’ll see three choices. I might suggest you not do this as if you worry about fragmentation, it’s likely only a low or medium alert.
At the bottom, you can set a minimum index size. Smaller indexes aren’t a problem, so keep this relatively high. You might have to decide if 1000 pages is really high enough.
Below this, you can set your notifications for this. In general, use the defaults and don’t customize this for an alert. The changes get hidden and people forget. Use the same settings everywhere.
That’s about it. However, read these thoughts from Jeff Moden before you get too worried about index fragmentation.
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