Hi. My name is Richard Douglas. And I'm a subject matter expert for SQL Server, here at Dell Software. My job, today, is to help you make configuring spotlights on SQL Server a super easy task.
In this video, in the series on configuring spotlights on SQL Server, I'll be showing you how you can tweak the console, itself, to suit your needs. I'll be covering how you can change the appearance of charts, how to change the severity of colors if you suffer from red green color blindness, as well as some other useful tips.
So let's get started. As with all configuration changes in spotlights on SQL Server enterprise, we need to go over to the Configure menu. Once you've clicked on the Configure menu, we can see lots of options. On the one we wish to choose today is to configure the spotlight console, itself. As you can see, when I hover over, there is a Configure Spotlight option. We're just going to click on this.
So the first thing we might want to do, especially if we're using a plasma screen for an IT department, is that we might want to look at changing the appearance of charts, themselves. So if we want to do that, we'll just click on Change the appearance of charts. So when I go on-site, to do proof of concept work, this is something that I, quite often, do.
Here, we can change how thick the lines are. So again, if this is something that's on a wall, it might not be very close to somebody. And so we might want to change how thick this appears, so it's easy to spot from a distance.
Also, we might want to remove some of these options here. So for example, we might want to remove the tool tips here, when hovering over charts, especially if somebody's a senior DBA and knows what they're doing. Likewise, if this is something to going on a plasma screen or a large LED screen in an office, maybe we want to have a different amount of data to look at, in terms of the history for the charts, so at a glance, we can see how SQL Server is trending over time.
So this is how you might want to set up different kinds of charts for different consoles. I'll cancel this. The next thing we can do is to change how the colors look inside of spotlights. So if you do suffer from red green color blindness, and I know quite a few people who do, then we do offer an alternative here. We offer yellow and a different shade of green, instead.
Also, some of the other things we can do is we can change what happens when a control is clicked. So I like to think of this as a career progression chart. So as a junior DBA, I might always want to show the details. So it says here, clicking on a control will display an information window which describes things about the alarm that's currently being raised.
So a junior DBA, I might want to have the option, or once I'm using Spotlight, for the first month or so, I might want to use Spotlight as a training tool to see what each of these alarms actually means. So as I progress throughout my career, it might be that I only want to look at the details if an alarm is being raised. So this is where I'm more comfortable with Spotlight. I'm more comfortable with the internals of SQL Server. And so I might not always want to see what's behind it, unless there's a particular problem in that area of SQL Server.
And if I'm a senior DBA, and I've been using Spotlight for quite a long time, what I might want to do is just to skip all of that details and go directly to the appropriate drill down. And this can save me a little bit of time, which might be really important for you.
Here, we can change how a spotlight is viewed when it opens up. So the default view, when you open up the spotlight console, is to show the heat map. Now, if you've deployed to console to different kinds of people within your organization-- so maybe you've sent this to system administrators, maybe you've sent it to sound specialists, maybe you sent it to the help desk-- they might benefit from having the default view as the Spotlight Today screen. And I can show you how that looks in a moment.
So first I close this. And then move to Monitor. What I can do is click on Spotlight Today.
And this shows me the different kinds of alarms that have been raised for Spotlight. And so, as a sound expert, for example, it might be that if there is an I/O set of alarms, maybe this might be a better way to display the kind of information that this person would be interested in. Likewise, if this is sent to a SysAdmin person, then this would highlight the problems for particular kinds of Windows connection problems.
So let's move back to the configurations now. And the last thing I wanted to show you was how you can adjust the performance and quality of the Spotlight console, itself. So it might be that your machine is slightly under-spec'ed, and you're struggling for resources when there is a problem, and you've loaded up Spotlight to see what's going on.
So thankfully, inside of Spotlight, we have a sliding scale here, which gives you a trade off between high quality and low performance or low quality and high performance. So as I said, if you are struggling for resources, you probably want to move this bar across. So it's not quite as detailed. It's not quite as bright and fluid as it might be. But it does mean that it's not as energy sapping
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