Happy New Year! Every year for New Years we all make a big deal of coming up with New Years Resolutions. Here’s one from me to you.

Baselines

Why are baselines important? Have you ever heard The server is slow? Is it? Can you be sure? I mean what exactly is slow? It’s such a personal thing. I’ve seen people complain about queries running slower than usual when they were actually, provably, faster. The only way you can tell is if you know how fast things are on average. In fact, it’s handy to have a normal range. I should probably point out that normal does not mean acceptable. It will, however, tell you if things are getting worse. On top of that if you want useable alerts without a ton of false positives then you need a baseline. That way you can tell when a setting is no longer normal.

Anyway, enough about why, here’s your homework. Read this post by the Tiger Team.

SQL Server Performance Baselining Reports Unleashed for Enterprise Monitoring !!!

You could also read this SE question and its responses (there are also a fair number of good links):

Creating SQL Server Performance Baseline Monitoring

Once you’ve done the reading take some time and think about how you can implement baseline reporting in your environment. Actually setting it up is probably a bit much for this post (although I may add something like that in later) but at least start thinking about it.