• Foglight Skills 101: Send Emails when Alarms Fire

    Foglight administrators and other Foglight performance monitoring users who are asked to configure alarms to send email notifications sometimes struggle if they miss a step or two in the process.   This post is meant to take you through the basics, and…

  • Your Performance Monitor Might be Alerting Exactly How You Told it To - Badly

    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…

  • Similar Solutions and Customer Conversations: Spotlight and Foglight

    I normally write about specific aspects of the solutions that I support, but I thought I'd try something a little different today. For those of you that don't know, I'm a sales engineer supporting Quest's Database Performance Monitorin…

  • Quest Customer Story: Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise Provides Twofold Benefit for International Application Delivery Company

    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…

  • Foglight Tip: Silence Alarms Using Blackouts

    During periods of scheduled maintenance, you may wish to prevent Foglight from sending alarms about the systems involved in the maintenance task. The use case is quite obvious. You know the system's down for maintenance and there's no need for you to…

  • Toad Turnpike: Real Stories from the Road

    Off-roading, Maps, and Nine Gray Hairs

    We all tend to spend most of our time on the “turnpike” of a product’s feature set: you know, the “power” set of its features that get us to many of our endpoint destinations within the product as productively as…

  • Capacity Planning Top Challenges – Part 2

    In this post, I’d like to focus on what has changed over the last 10 and 20 years in Capacity Planning and its challenges. Make sure to read Capacity Planning Part 1 before continuing on. I will start by covering couple of very important issues…

  • Bridge the Monitoring Gap with Spotlight Developer

    Recently, I presented our Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise solution to someone who expressed concerns about being notified of problems in the monitored environment. In this person's scenario, he mentioned that their organization did not have a Help…

  • Report for Duty, Part II - Spotlight Performance Monitoring

    Customizing and Automating Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise Reports

     In my previous post, I wrote about configuring and executing reports using Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise. The purpose of this entry is to describe, at a very high-level, what's…

  • Report for Duty part 1 - Spotlight Performance Monitoring

    I'm surprised by the number of people that aren't aware that our Spotlight Performance Monitoring tool provides a tremendous number of reports. I suspect this is because we do not create the Spotlight Statistics Repository during the initial installation…

  • Want To Synchronize Very Large Tables?

    When very large tables are out of sync on the target and Compare is not a suitable sync option, it requires a set of coordinated steps to bring them in sync with the source tables. This is especially true if the downtime on the source table is not acceptable…

  • What’s New for Toad for SQL Server 6.7 – November 2016

    What’s New for Toad for SQL Server 6.7 – November 2016

    This monthly publication will provide new and updated information regarding the products that we offer and organized in the following categories: product notifications, new knowledgebase…

  • What’s New for Toad for Oracle 12.10 – November 2016

    This monthly publication will provide new and updated information regarding the products that we offer and organized in the following categories: product notifications, new knowledgebase articles, product life cycle, services, training, trending videos…

  • Got any new ideas for Stat?

    We have activated the “Ideas” portal on the Stat community for Enhancement Request submissions. Anyone in the Community can now post their enhancement requests on the Ideas portal. Community members along with Quest internal employees will be able to…

  • Stat 5.x Keyboard Cheat Sheet

    Hello!

    As our world becomes faster, our lives busier, our days longer, any shortcut we can find and share with friends is a good thing.

    Below is a list of keyboard shortcuts that I use frequently within Stat. I hope that you find them useful as well.

  • To Patch (quickly) or not to Patch (quickly)? That is the question.

    With the advent of Oracle Release 12.2.x, Oracle has delivered to its customers the ability to do online patching for their environments. According to Oracle, this new feature will help customers “greatly  reduce the downtime that was needed in previous…

  • Are Application Changes Giving You an Eye Twitch?

    You’re in the tech industry, you love the latest gadgets and gizmos, you’re all about innovation ― and yet you’re stuck wrangling all the moving parts of managing application changes…manually?

    There are probably…

  • Change Management: Is it Art or Science? [New tech brief]

    How much of change management, version control and migration management is art, and how much is science?

    I worked for an IT director who had been through dozens of audits and migrations. He used to talk about “the Art and Science of IT.”

  • Ending the Application Change Management Insanity

    We have robots that clean floors, planes that practically fly themselves and soon we’ll all be riding around in driverless cars. So why are IT managers, of all people, still expected to do so much work…manually?

    Dude, where’s my automation…

  • The Secret to Stress-free Audits (and Happier Workdays)

    Root canal, appendectomy, IT audit. Which is the most painful? Well, considering you’re numb with your feet up for the first two, I’d have to pick the latter.

    Few things in life are more of a pain, and cause more stress, than the dreaded…