Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise

Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise provides deep insight into database health

Easily optimize and tune SQL Server performance monitoring on any device

SQL Server environments are becoming more and more complex while remaining a critical component of your application architecture. It’s a struggle to keep up with this continual growth. What if you could proactively manage your SQL Server environment by viewing the health of all of your SQL Server instances on a single screen, anytime, anywhere on any device?

You can with Spotlight® on SQL Server Enterprise. Manage your SQL Server environment while also gaining visibility into your operating system – Windows or Linux – and monitor your virtualization infrastructure as well. Spend less time fighting fires, by accurately diagnosing both real-time, and historical performance issues, and focus on more proactive measures like query tuning.

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Features
Tour
Specifications
Resources
Support & Services

Features

24x7 SQL Server monitoring and diagnostics

Establish around-the-clock, agentless monitoring from a centralized diagnostic server for a single view across multiple clients, with alarms and notifications when performance deviates from pre-set operating thresholds.

Simplicity without compromise

Install quickly and monitor large environments easily. Template configurations, automated alerts and customizable actions for simple configuration. Intuitive overviews and mobile device support deliver the data you need where and when you need it.

Powerful root cause analysis

Create multiple diagnostic workflows, including detailed wait stat/workload analysis and deadlock detection, with over 70 diagnostic drilldowns. Correctly recognize the symptoms to correctly deal with the root cause of any diagnostic challenge.

End-to-end monitoring

Get a complete picture of everything that affects your SQL Server performance including SQL Server itself, the underlying operating system, its VM layer, SQL Azure, high availability, replication and analysis services .

Never miss a beat with playback and mobile

Rewind your dashboards and diagnostic drilldowns to the time an incident occurred and step through it in slow motion. Monitor your SQL Server environment anywhere, anytime and run SQL Server diagnostics directly from your mobile device or web browser.

Multidimensional analysis

Analyze workload elements and wait stats by database, application, user, host or SQL statement. Establish top SQL and drill down to determine the biggest contributors to the SQL Server workload.

Customize for your environment

Set custom thresholds or create counters specific to your environment. Create rule-based, custom actions or define planned outages on a one-time or recurring basis.

Tool of choice

Integrate with enterprise monitoring or issue tracking systems. Use the SCOM management pack to easily integrate Spotlight as the tool of choice for your SQL Server needs.

SQL analysis and Xpert tuning

Utilize the SQL Optimizer integration feature to highlight long-running queries and sub-optimal code. With this information you can immediately tune, benchmark and investigate indexing strategies.

Historical trending and reporting

Understand the health, activity and capacity trends of your SQL Server environment with integrated management and performance views and client-side reports.

System Healthcheck and Collective Intelligence

Obtain a holistic view of the health of your system and benchmark results with other users.

PagerDuty integration

Users of PagerDuty can now send Spotlight alarm notifications to a PagerDuty dashboard.

Manage large-scale monitoring deployments

For large-scale SQL Server deployments, Spotlight provides custom views and template configuration to make monitoring your environment easy at any scale.

Tour

Prioritize at a Glance

Our Heatmap prioritizes at a glance across all monitored instances.

Intuitive Dashboards

Follow indicators on context-specific dashboards to the problem source.

Monitor and diagnose

Operating system diagnostics with SQL Server VNext on Linux

Never Miss a Beat

Instantly respond to issues with native apps for your mobile device.

Wait Stat Analysis

Quickly identify what is waiting on resources right down to SQL statements.

Workload Analysis

Divide workload by host, database, user or SQL statement in a few clicks.

Replication Dashboard

Watch for any failures or bottlenecks across your replication topology.

Analysis Services

Monitor instances from the Spotlight dashboard and diagnostic drilldowns.

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Specifications

Spotlight client

Before installing the Spotlight client, ensure your system meets the following minimum hardware and software requirements:

Platform: 1GHz Processor

Memory: 1GB RAM recommended

Hard disk space

200MB

This space should exist on a local disk drive rather than a network drive

Operating system

Microsoft Windows 10 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Microsoft Windows 8.1 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Microsoft Windows 8 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Microsoft Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Additional software

SQL Server Client Tools

To use the Discovery Wizard to locate SQL Servers on your network, the SQL Server Client Tools must be installed on the Spotlight client. The SQL Server Client Tools can be found on the installation disk for Microsoft SQL Server 2000, 2005 or 2008.

Install .NET 2.0 or later

To use the Spotlight Report Viewer, .NET 2.0 or later must be installed on the Spotlight client machine.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later.

Other requirements

CD-ROM drive or internet connection (required for installation only).
A monitor capable of supporting a resolution of 1280x1024 or greater

Diagnostic Server

Before installing the Diagnostic Server, ensure your system meets the following minimum hardware and software requirements:

Platform: 2GHz Dual Core Processor

Memory: 300MB

Hard disk space

4GB RAM

If the Diagnostic Server’s connection to the Spotlight Statistics Repository or playback database is interrupted, the Diagnostic Server will cache data to the local disk. In this event, an extra 2MB per hour, per monitored server is required.

Operating system

Microsoft Windows 10 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Microsoft Windows 8.1 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Microsoft Windows 8 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Microsoft Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Additional software

.NET 3.5 or later must be installed on the Diagnostic Server machine.

SQL Server Client Tools

To use the Discovery Wizard to locate SQL Servers on your network, the SQL Server Client Tools must be installed on the Diagnostic Server. The SQL Server Client Tools are on the installation disk for Microsoft SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008.
To use Spotlight on Analysis Services, the Client Connectivity tools must be installed.

SQL Server Management Tools

To use Spotlight on Analysis Services, Spotlight on SQL Server Replication, and Session Trace and SQL Analysis in Spotlight on SQL Server, SQL Server Management Tools must be installed on the Diagnostic Server.
The SQL Server Management Tools are available from any SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2008 edition except SQL Server Express and SQL Server Compact. The version required corresponds to the latest version of SQL Server that you are monitoring. Note, if you are monitoring SQL Server 2000 servers, you need the Management Tools from SQL Server 2005.

Monitoring

SQL Server

Spotlight can diagnose SQL Server instances of the following versions:

SQL Server 2005 through 2017

Spotlight on SQL Server also supports MSDE (2000), SQL Express (2005) and SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and SQL Server 2012 Express. Note that use of these versions to host playback or Spotlight Statistics Repository databases is not supported.

Spotlight cannot diagnose earlier versions of SQL Server (version 7.x and earlier).

Spotlight supports all SQL Server sort orders, including case-sensitive and binary sort orders. Spotlight cannot connect to SQL Server instances where the instance name contains non-US ASCII characters.

Operating system

Spotlight on SQL Server can monitor virtual guest machines in a VMware ESX infrastructure. The following versions are supported:

VMware vCenter 2.5 (or later)
VMware ESX Server 4.0 (or later)
Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 (64-bit)

Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit)
Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit)

Note: On each monitored instance, Spotlight requires the network setting "File and Print Sharing" to be enabled and any firewall to be configured to:

open port 1434 for UDP packets
open the SQL Server TCP port (default is 1433)

Virtualization

Spotlight on SQL Server can monitor virtual guest machines in a VMware ESX infrastructure. The following versions are supported:

VMware vCenter 2.5 (or later)

VMware ESX Server 4.0 (or later)

Spotlight on SQL Server can monitor virtual machines in a Hyper-V® infrastructure. Spotlight supports

Hyper-V® 6.2 and above.

Spotlight Statistics Repository

Before installing the Spotlight Statistics Repository, ensure your system meets the following minimum requirements:

Database sizing

By default, the size of the Spotlight Statistics Repository is set to 1000MB (data size) and 250MB (log size). These sizes are flexible and can be changed by running the Spotlight Statistics Repository creation script.

The script is located in the install directory as follows:

..\Plug-ins\Diagnostics Server\Scripts

Hard disk space: Approximately 1.2GB for each monitored SQL Server instance and the corresponding monitored Windows host on which the SQL Server instance resides. This estimate assumes default configuration in an average environment. Actual space used will depend on your environment and any data collection/storage configuration changes that are made. For more information, see the Spotlight on SQL Server Sizing Wizard. You can access the wizard from the Spotlight Installation Center. To use Spotlight Reporting and Trending, it is recommended that the Spotlight Statistics Repository is installed on SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2 or SQL Server 2012.

Recommended SQL Server version

Installing the Spotlight Statistics Repository on SQL Server 2000 can result in errors being displayed and no data being shown in some views. Installing the Spotlight Statistics Repository on SQL Server 2000 is not recommended.

Note: Due to the size of the Spotlight Statistics Repository, it is recommended that this database is not installed on a SQL Express instance.

Other requirements

The SQL Browser service must be running on the machine where the Spotlight Statistics Repository is installed. Alternatively you can use the host and port number of the (named) SQL Server instance you want to connect to, when creating a connection and connecting to the Spotlight Statistics Repository.

The TCP protocol must be enabled on the instance where the Spotlight Statistics Repository resides.

For more information, see the Spotlight on SQL Server Deployment Guide.

Maintenance: It is highly recommended that regular maintenance is performed on the Spotlight Statistics Repository. The recommended maintenance plan is outlined in the online help and in the Spotlight on SQL Server Deployment Guide.

Playback database

Before installing the playback database, ensure your system meets the following minimum requirements:

Database sizing: By default, the size of the playback database is set to 500MB (data size) and 125MB (log size).

Hard disk space

Requires approximately 270MB for each monitored SQL Server instance and the corresponding monitored Windows host on which the SQL Server instance resides.

Assumes default configuration in an average environment. Actual space used will depend on your environment and any data collection/storage configuration changes that are made.

For more information see the Spotlight on SQL Server Sizing Wizard, you can access the wizard from the Spotlight Installation Center.

Recommended SQL Server version: Due to the size of the playback database, it is recommended that this database is not installed on a SQL Express instance.

Other requirements

The SQL Browser service must be running on the machine where the playback database is installed. Alternatively you can use the host and port number of the (named) SQL Server instance you want to connect to, when creating a connection and connecting to the playback database.

The TCP protocol must be enabled on the instance where the playback database resides.

For more information, see the Spotlight on SQL Server Deployment Guide

Maintenance: It is highly recommended that regular maintenance is performed on the playback database. The recommended maintenance plan is outlined in the online help and in the Spotlight on SQL Server Deployment Guide.