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The first lesson in my first computer class in school taught this: “garbage in, garbage out”. The point, of course, was that an information system can only act according to what it’s been told. It can’t read minds and assume what you meant rather than what you’ve told it. Well, maybe some can now, but that’s for another discussion. If you look at your performance monitor as an information...

In a previous post, we learned how to disable specific Foglight alarm severities . For example, maybe you don't want a warning alert when cpu utilization is only at 70% - if so, you can disable that, while keeping the rule active to alert when the condition gets worse. After letting Foglight monitor your environment for "a while", you might find some rules that aren't relevant for you. In that case...

A customer recently had the need to get a count of the number of SQL Server instances that Spotlight on SQL Server is deployed to. There are several ways to do this, depending on requirements and how fancy you'd like to get. The simplest way is to simply look at the Spotlight interface on the left hand panel for the default "SQL Server" view and note the number of instances that Spotlight is configured...

A previous post showed how to modify a registry variable to apply a value to a specific host . It would be good if the actual value that is going to be used when the rule fires could be validated. The "Run Condition Query" feature in the Rules Editor will help. As a reminder, here are the scoped values that we used for the Page In rate. The global value is 256.0. We scoped the value to host fglstudent5...

In a previous post, the Rules dashboard was used to show how to modify the global value of an alarm threshold . For this particular rule, that value would then apply to all hosts that are being monitored. What if we only want a subset of hosts to take on a different value? This tutorial will show you how to do that. Starting in the Rules dashboard, locate the rule to modify. Clicking the button shown in the image below...

Do you know what your applications look like? Application Topology even for Composite applications The bigger the application, and the more composite it is, understanding its Topology becomes a lot more important. What is connected to what? How are the flows for the transactions? Where are the bottlenecks and the slowdowns? I have seen some really ugly Topology diagrams. The one that comes to mind was one that one of...

I recently showed a customer how to modify the thresholds and severity levels of Database alarms by using the Foglight for Databases administration dashboard. A follow-up question was about how to do the same thing for alarms that were appearing for ...

It’s been amazing how much creativity and innovation is out there. Customers have been teaching me a lot over the last 20 plus years. Two identical applications behave differently for two different clients and their different customers and in their different environments. I am a Van Gogh fan. Like any Van Gogh painting, you see beautiful and mostly bright colors, and the amazing shades that are used. There are some...

Java monitoring instrumentation levels, who would know better than you? Java Monitoring for Dev, Test, QA and Prod environments & collection options Best part of my job over the last 20+ years is working with more than 200 companies and working very closely with a few dozens. The variety that I have been exposed to has helped me learn a lot from these diverse environments and the people involved. Most companies...

Do you know where your java transactions are, part 2 Java Workload Characterization – Part 2. My 3, 5, 7, 10 Rule I hope you had a chance to look at do you know where your java transactions are, my Java Workload Characterization – Part 1 blog. And I love to hear what else you can add or suggest to our audience. Here in this part two, I like to cover some additional dimensions to my monitoring. Occasionally...

The famous Yankee, Yogi Berra once said, “If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up someplace else.” This applies to lots of different things and since this is a blog about SQL, you likely know where I am going with this - Execution Plans. Simply put, Execution Plans, sometimes referred to as Query Plans, are maps of the query's data retrieval methods. In my spare time, I am an avid...

Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise provides excellent real-time monitoring and workload analytics for SQL Server and more, but before it can do that, you’ve got to point Spotlight to what you’d like it to watch. Luckily, that’s as simple as going to Configure > Connections to get to the Connection Manager: As you can see in the screenshot above, Spotlight can connect to a number of different types...

One of the nice features in Foglight is the possibility to extend the existing monitoring capabilities by custom script agents. Unfortunately it is not possible to directly call PowerShell scripts within Foglight. In the following, I would like to describe how to bypass this restriction by using a Windows batch file. The example will be a script that reads information about Windows start times from a XML file generated...

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 is providing value for them. The DBA Team Lead shared a recent experience in which Spotlight was instrumental in maintaining peak performance of their...

When monitoring databases for performance , we certainly want to understand things like CPU spikes, memory pressure, I/O latency, and the like. If we see this type of performance, the next step is to take a closer look and attempt to find out what's causing it, right? But taking a step back for a moment, have you ever realized one of the first questions you are often asking yourself when you notice performance deviations...