“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change “- Heraclitus.
Development, new applications, upgrades, patches, maintenance, schema updates…the list goes on and on around ways that changes are introduced into your environment. Sometimes these…
“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change “- Heraclitus.
Development, new applications, upgrades, patches, maintenance, schema updates…the list goes on and on around ways that changes are introduced into your environment. Sometimes these…
In Part 1 of this blog post, I review how you can get an evaluation copy and explain the various integration points from Quest’s monitoring solutions – Foglight and Spotlight Enterprise. You can find it here -> https://www.quest.com/community…
In the recent 5.7.5.50 release of Foglight for SQL Server, a change was made to the TempDB drilldown. Specifically, the Sessions tab would formerly show the current sessions, regardless of the time range selected on the dashboard. Now, it will allow you…
One of the many ways to improve database performance is to tune SQL queries running in your environment. Two primary reasons for tuning are:
So, you’ve downloaded and installed an evaluation of Spotlight Enterprise. Good news…it comes with a 30-day evaluation license key! Spotlight is fully functional (not limited trial functionality). It simply expires after the 30 days. There are a couple…
During a recent installation of Foglight for SQL/Oracle the DBA announced how excited he was to get Foglight installed because he was desperate to become a pro-active DBA and stop being a re-active one. Music to my ears!
So what was it about Foglight…
I've done a number of posts recently that touch on Foglight administration, customization, or some of the more advanced capabilities of the product. I felt it was a good time to circle back on some of the more basic use cases that Foglight can help…
For those of you that have been using Foglight for some time may have seen how the solution not only captures and retains metric data historically, but also applies baselines to estimate the system performance and help with system monitoring and planning…
It is a foregone conclusion that performance monitoring is part and parcel of managing a database instance once it is in production. But what about pre-production? Especially when the instance itself is reaching critical phases of testing and quality…
In an earlier blog, I wrote about a company’s success with Quest’s flagship SQL Server monitoring and diagnostics solution – Spotlight Enterprise. The blog detailed a customer success story and revealed detailed use cases explaining how this application…
If you are someone who is responsible for administering Foglight when used for monitoring SQL Server Instances, you will likely run into the situation where you want certain databases to be neglected from the overall monitoring. There are going to be those…
I often get asked about monitoring SQL workload that is consuming a database instance’s resources. The first question that comes to my mind is, “What is the symptom you are trying to resolve?” Are you looking to understand the root cause of compute resource…
Spotlight notifies DBAs of performance issues via triggered alarm messages. More importantly, specific actions can be taken based on these alarms, by configuring the Alarm Actions feature of Spotlight. Read our blog about Alarm Actions configuration …
We are pleased to announce the general availability of Foglight for SQL Server and Foglight for Oracle versions 5.7.5.35. This release provides the following significant enhancements:
Microsoft has evolved their marketing over the past several years to focus on the fact that SQL Server is more than just a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). You may have noticed, that Microsoft commonly now refers to SQL Server as the SQL…
This large organization was using 6 different monitoring products. SCOM for windows, BMC for Linux, Riverbed Steel Central for APM, Oracle OEM for Oracle Databases, SCOM for SQL Server databases, VMWare for VM monitoring, and Empirix for web transaction…
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…
The pursuit of historical data and its analysis is a significant part of the functionality that Spotlight on SQL Server users have come to expect and continue to seek improvements upon. In the past, users have expressed the need for ad-hoc query capability…
As we continue our navigation of Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise and we can diagnose an alarm that triggers. Let us see what setting caused an alarm to trigger. The fact is when you start monitoring an Instance it is assigned the preset “Factory Settings…
Just the facts! Part 2
Acknowledging Alarms in Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise
Now that we have establish a view of the facts let’s see what we can do with them. Some on these alarms are set by default to be acknowledged before they will clear for…
The original “Just the Facts” blog I discussed how to see just the Alarms displayed in “Spotlight Today” within Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise. Now it is time to see what we can do with those Facts or Alarms. Spotlight comes with factory settings…
I want to address a specific issue in Spotlight, SQL Server performance monitoring tool, with filtering out blocking alert but the principal can be applied to other alarms. The scenario is that you only want to get email alerts for one specific database…
Whether it’s hitting sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats DMV with calculated queries, collecting Perfmon Disk Counter statistics, reviewing Resource Monitor Disk information, or keeping your storage admin close by, I/O issues are all too familiar a concern.…
Were you ever sitting in a salary review when you suddenly discovered that you and your boss had different ideas about your most important responsibilities?
Not every DBA has a position-specific job description, and even those who do may not have…
by Andy Grant
I read a post recently on The Grateful DBA that describes his analysis in testing different compression levels in LiteSpeed for SQL Server and their impact on both backup size and efficiency. In his own words this is a "non-scientific,…