*Record Scratch*

*Freeze Frame*

Yup, that's me. You're probably wondering how I got into this situation...

I was just minding my own business, trying to configure a SQL Server connection in Spotlight Enterprise, when it starts chirping about…

Put another way... -> Introduction 

What is Spotlight? 

Spotlight is a laser-focused monitoring and diagnostics solution for SQLServer (by Quest).

The following is a series of short videos to help you learn and understand the primary capabilities of…

This short video reviews Spotlight's Alarm Actions. (4:14)

Download Spotlight

This short video reviews Spotlight's Playback feature. (4:33)

Download Spotlight

This short video reviews Spotlight's navigation and workflow. (3:39)

Download Spotlight

SQL Server provides us with a number of high availability and disaster recovery solutions. Two of them are Always On Availability Groups and Always On Failover Cluster offerings. In order to leverage these options, they themselves need to be constantly…

Spotlight reports are designed in SQL Server Report Definition files (RDL) and stored in the local installation folder of Spotlight client application making them accessible to Spotlight users. By default this path in Spotlight is C:\Program Files (x86…

When dealing with large number of connections, the power and advantage of PowerShell API can be leveraged to manage, automate, and administer Spotlight configuration. The efficiency gains obtained through command line access to automate configuration…

Spotlight notifies DBAs of performance issues via triggered alarm messages. More importantly, specific actions can be taken based on these alarms, by configuring the Alarm Actions feature of Spotlight. Read our blog about Alarm Actions configuration …

Spotlight’s vast alarm customization capabilities enables users a wide variety of options.  Setting alarm severity levels, their start and end threshold values, or disabling them completely are just a few. Fortunately, Spotlight performance moni…

System administrators find themselves frequently applying required updates to their server hardware, operating system, security packages, or disaster recovery processes in order to maintain system and data integrity.  Such enterprise modifications occasionally…

A Picture is worth a thousand words!

Execution plans can help us identify the performance hog sections of SQL code that impact CPU usage and I/O operations.  Addressing these bottlenecks can ultimately help us achieve the best execution times.  What if…

Spotlight Cloud is a cloud hosted database monitoring and diagnostics application providing DBAs with diagnostic tools to quickly identify and help resolve performance issues.  The Workload Analyzer of Spotlight Cloud is a very robust query evaluator tool…

We’re excited to announce that with Spotlight version 12.3, the Plan Visualizer feature now includes several new enhancements. In my last blog, I covered the Plan Visualizer feature included in version 12.0 which provides a display view of the estimated…

We all get excited when our cell phone plan includes so called “Unlimited Data.”  But, you know what happens if we push your luck.  That’s right; we start to experience performance issues and get tossed into the dreaded 2G zone!

A similar…

Spotlight Enterprise 12.4 comes with some neat features you do not want to miss!

Query Execution Plans available when needed the most:

The Workload Analysis and the Query Execution Statistics drilldowns expose the most resource intensive transactions…

Just like most people’s goal towards incorporating more raw food into their daily diet, accessing and manipulating raw data is very much a coveted functionality.

The Spotlight Statistics Repository database is a repository for historical data collected…

Spotlight 13.0 introduces a brand new feature of managing access to monitored connections at the user level. It provides the ability to assign or deny a user access to a set of connections that have been configured to be monitored in Spotlight.

The need…