In this post, alarms were configured to only fire upon the instances contained within a Database Group. These groups are created and managed from the Databases dashboard, but underneath, they are really service definitions. Now, what if we are using …

We often get requests to only fire certain alarms (eg. hours since last log backup) on a specific set of instances (or other objects, like jobs, databases, etc.). One way to do that is to leverage the Database Groupings and use those to limit the ala…

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 constan…

One of the primary needs of those responsible for maintaining the health of database environments is to efficiently find poorly performing queries. Are there resource-intensive queries running? Are there long-running queries running? Who is running t…

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 (x…

Spotlight users sometimes ask if it offers baseline capabilities. Though Spotlight does not learn a baseline of workload activity, it does provide the ability to view particular metric values over customizable timeframes. In doing so, it may allow fo…

IT Administrators need to keep an eye on Availability, Performance, and Storage of mission-critical environments. There are many things to consider as you develop a Monitoring and Diagnostics strategy.  Items to consider include: All-...

If you’d like to try out Foglight for Databases or Foglight for SQL Server, you can download the full software for a 30-day evaluation, and one of us here at Quest will be happy to assist you with getting it set up. The brief Ins...

The IoT, Internet of Things, has arrived.  Sensors are everywhere, collecting more and more data about us and the world around us.  Temperature, Humidity, Fluid Levels, Traffic counts, the status of devices and things like doors and elevato...

Traditionally, DBAs are the ones primarily tasked with maintaining high availability and peak performance of the database environment. Therefore, they assume the responsibility of evaluating Performance Monitoring solutions. This requires identi...

  What has become a typical theme in the arena of Information Technology are the concerns around managing costs associated with these systems.  Whether it be the capital and operating expenditures associated with the data center, or the o...

I recently had a customer ask if they can audit SELECT operations for 1 table and 1 view in a specific database where the SELECT only contains certain keywords. This article covers advanced filtering in ApexSQL Audit. This post will provide a tutoria…