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 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…

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…

I'm surprised by the number of people that aren't aware that our Spotlight Performance Monitoring tool provides a tremendous number of reports. I suspect this is because we do not create the Spotlight Statistics Repository during the initial installation…

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.…

Hello and welcome to my first blog.  If I'm honest, I've been pondering hard on what my first blog should be and I think I found just the topic to get my feet wet. 

One of the common cases that I often see users of Spotlight on SQL Server…

Do you ever wonder why Spotlight throws an Access Denied or WMI error while monitoring a Windows server when your user account has all the permissions needed to access that server? You might encounter these errors on the Home page or even…

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…

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…