One tool I have always wanted to find was an inexpensive, or better yet open systems tool for monitoring Windows servers; specifically SQL Servers.
Monitoring your server is a great resource when your performance starts to drag. Having a history of your server and database performance can help you determine if you have simply exceeded a threshold, deployed some poorly optimized code, project future performance, and diagnose some kinds of issues.
You could monitor your CPU utilization, network performance, memory, each key factors in maintaining the performance of a database server. If you have a history, you can tell if your current performance is in keeping with trends, or a recent anomaly.
I have found a number of open systems tools for monitoring servers. However, they all tend to be Linux based in one or more significant component, and require quite a bit of work to get them to work monitoring a Windows server.
Today I came across a version of Spotlight from Dell which is a database and server monitoring tool they purchased along with other software from Quest. I saw they have a free version of Spotlight Essentials allowing you to monitor your SQL Server. Spotlight Essentials adds a service to the server handling the capture of data, and pushes the monitoring results into your private account in the Dell cloud.
The cool part is the consumption of the results. They have created an extension to SQL Server Management Studio allowing you to configure things to monitor and to mine the results of monitoring. They even have some tuning options to find the worst performing queries, and many other things you’ll just need to see for yourself. I found their information at https://www.spotlightessentials.com/Documentation/AboutSpotlight.
Do you have other monitoring software you prefer? Share it here online, or please send me your information at btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben