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Customized Alerting with Spotlight on SQL Server

Greg RobidouxSQL Server Professional

SQL Server DBA Professionals

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This review is based on the FREE SQL Server

performance monitoring tool:

Spotlight on SQL Server. 

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Managing SQL Server requires many tasks to be performed by DBAs, including:

• Making sure databases are backed up• Performance is acceptable• Releasing updates into production• Security changes• SQL upgrades• Adding databases• Monitoring• And more…

Managing SQL Server…

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Maintenance and monitoring are not the most fun aspects of being a DBA, but without these tasks you are headed for disaster.

Maintenance can be set up on an automated schedule.

Monitoring requires human effort to ensure the real issues are being looked at and the non-critical items are put on the back burner.

Maintenance & monitoring…

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In order to have a proper monitoring system you need to identify what needs to be monitored, how you are alerted, and what items are critical. 

Maintenance & monitoring…

The Problem: You can setup jobs to capture critical information in T-SQL and SQL Agent, but it is not as easy to set limitations for when and how frequently you are notified.

The Solution:

Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise.

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• Alarm Actions– Allow you to set up specific

criteria as to when an action should take place

– Based on how an alarm (alert) is configured

• Focus on the real issues and not be bothered by non-critical items.

Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise

Example:

When CPU has reached 90% for 5 minutes or more during business hours, then an email might be sent to the DBA team.

You might have a highly intensive CPU operation that runs every night, which you know is not critical and do not want to be notified.

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Conditions build criteria that determine if an alarm action is to be fired –

• The alarm is…– Identifies what alarms

make up this action (one or many)

• The connection’s tag is…– Setup tags that group

specific servers together (production, development, etc.)

• The day of the week is…– Determine which days of

the week the alarm should be fired.

Alarm Actions – Conditions

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Actions allow us to determine what to do if all of the conditions are met –

• Send email to…– Which will send

an email to specified recipient

Alarm Actions – Actions

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Descriptions define the rules for the alarms–

Alarm Actions – Descriptions

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Here is another example of an alarm action based on page life expectancy that has occurred for at least 15 minutes with an action to write to the Spotlight on SQL Server log. Conditions –

Example: Page Life Expectancy

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Actions –

Example: Page Life Expectancy

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Descriptions –

Example: Page Life Expectancy

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Based on the examples, we were able to further define when an action occurs based on several sets of criteria instead of just a counter or measure reaching a certain threshold.

This allows you to further hone in on the mission critical servers as well as critical items that need to be addressed by the DBA team.

There are several conditions and actions that can be taken besides just sending an email –

Trying to replicate this level of complexity would take a great amount of work in T-SQL and SQL Server Agent

Hone in…

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You can set up the alarms once and then build different criteria for more critical servers so you can focus on

what is really important.

The beauty is…

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Download a FREE TRIAL of Spotlight on SQL Server

and start using Alarm Actions

today!

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