The pursuit of historical data and its analysis is a significant part of the functionality that Spotlight on SQL Server users have come to expect and continue to seek improvements upon. In the past, users have expressed the need for ad-hoc query capability…
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…
In an earlier blog, I wrote about a company’s success with Quest’s flagship SQL Server monitoring and diagnostics solution – Spotlight Enterprise. The blog detailed a customer success story and revealed detailed use cases explaining how this application…
It never gets old hearing about how Quest Performance Monitoring solutions offer actionable insight to mission-critical systems. Upon visiting a customer for a 'health check' of their environment, we had the pleasure of learning about two distinct ways…
Spotlight on SQL Server provides excellent real-time monitoring, workload analytics and more for SQL Server. You can download the complete software for a 30-day trail on as many systems as you'd like. A previous post walked through the installation
…I recently spoke to a user of Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise who wanted to be able to drill into the individual SQL Server instances that are participating in an Availability Group. The customer had successfully created a connection to the Availability…
In Part 1 of this blog post, I review how you can get an evaluation copy and explain the various integration points from Quest’s monitoring solutions – Foglight and Spotlight Enterprise. You can find it here -> https://www.quest.com/community…
Naturally, it's VERY important to know when things are going wrong with our monitored instances. What's not helpful is the dreaded "False Positive." You know the scenario I'm about to describe. It's 03:00 and you're sleeping soundly and dreaming of the…
So, you’ve downloaded and installed an evaluation of Spotlight Enterprise. Good news…it comes with a 30-day evaluation license key! Spotlight is fully functional (not limited trial functionality). It simply expires after the 30 days. There are a couple…
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…
Capture the SQL performance metrics that are uniquely important to your environment
Spotlight on SQL Server arrives ready to collect and alert on all of the key SQL Server performance indicators that most enterprises need to know about. The out-of-the…
One of the many ways to improve database performance is to tune SQL queries running in your environment. Two primary reasons for tuning are:
I often get asked about monitoring SQL workload that is consuming a database instance’s resources. The first question that comes to my mind is, “What is the symptom you are trying to resolve?” Are you looking to understand the root cause of compute resource…
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 …
As we continue our navigation of Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise and we can diagnose an alarm that triggers. Let us see what setting caused an alarm to trigger. The fact is when you start monitoring an Instance it is assigned the preset “Factory Settings…
Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise‘s main purpose in life is to inform you of SQL Server performance problems, and then give you a quick way to diagnose their root causes so you can take action quickly. Email and mobile app notifications along with…
I'm very happy to report that a new release of Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise (version 11.7) is now available. This is a relatively minor release, mostly including fixes, although there are two enhancements worth mentioning. One that has been…
Whether it’s hitting sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats DMV with calculated queries, collecting Perfmon Disk Counter statistics, reviewing Resource Monitor Disk information, or keeping your storage admin close by, I/O issues are all too familiar a concern.…
Once in awhile, I find myself getting asked why Spotlight isn't firing off an email alert. If you find yourself in that situation and you have set up an alarm action, here are some quick pointers to help you check the issue.
Run the email test from…
While it’s no secret that cloud technologies are rapidly changing the way that organizations are running their IT infrastructures, for many organizations that I speak with, databases (and data in general) seem to be the slowest to move. There are…
A wealth of knowledge on SQL Server Wait Types awaits you in our Waitopedia site. Our in-depth information on SQL Server wait types gives you the upper hand when SQL Server performance is hindered due to one of these wait types. Wait statistics can point…
Here is an annoying issue that hopefully will never happen to you.
For the most part, there is just one service account to run the Diagnostic Server; however, some users may decide, "Hey, I'm going to monitor one or two connections with my own…
Auditing an application of its users’ activities can be useful and at times a mandatory task in tightly-secured environments. Spotlight has many robust capabilities such as deleting or disabling connections to changing alarm threshold values or stopping…
If you've been noticing that you're not getting deadlock email alerts from Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise even though alarms are popping up in Spotlight itself, then this workaround might be for you.
Before you move on though, I am assuming…
