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Data Callection

  • July 6, 2010 at 5:38 am

    #224546

    Hi experts

    I have a general question regarding SQL Server 2008 Data Collection. What are peoples thoughts / experience of implementing it (from a performance and database growth point of view)? And has anybody used it to monitor multiple servers etc?

    I have it set up on a VM and apart from the data collection jobs running, theres not a great deal of activity on this server, yet the database created to house the data has grown to about just over 2Gb.

    Thanks in advance

  • July 6, 2010 at 6:37 am

    #1189063

    I've only used it in testing, like yourself. I've found that it doesn't grow any worse than other monitoring software that we use (Idera & Microsoft Operations Manager). It just depends on the amount of information you're collecting and the frequency of the collection. Basically, it works very well and for the information it collects, worked as well as our other monitoring software. However, I found it to be a lot of work to set up and maintain, way beyond our other software. Also, we already have our other software set up, tuned, with alerts & emails in place... so it just didn't make sense to switch.

    If this is your first monitoring product in your environment, you should be happy with it. I'd suggest making plans to create a secondary warehouse of the performance data where you aggregate the data for historical tracking. This will allow you to set up a mechanism for getting rid of old data & reducing the amount you're keeping. We do that with our other product's data as well.

    "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
    - Theodore Roosevelt

    Author of:
    SQL Server Execution Plans
    SQL Server Query Performance Tuning

  • July 6, 2010 at 8:33 am

    #1189122

    Thanks for the reply, very usefull. It is currently the only monitoring tool im experimenting with and at present is only running on one of our VM test servers, but have to say I was impressed with the level of information it can give. I'll certainly consider archiving older data to a secondary database for historical trend analysis.

    Thanks

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