As a database administrator, monitoring database systems for performance, corruption, and data issues is an ongoing task. It is also an overwhelming task depending on how large the database environment is and the number of resources there are to manage the environment. The need to have good data is key to making informed decisions. However, there are so many tools that can collect and analyze the data that often they did not capture the metrics you need and therefore you cannot solve the problem.
By using SQL Diagnostic Manager, it captures the data collection, data aggregation, data presentation, data linking, and historical data. That data is ready anytime, therefore giving the database administrator or whoever manages the SQL Server environment the keys to solving any issue and to keep the databases running as optimal as possible. Without the use of SQL Diagnostic Manager, you spend most of the time setting up data collection mechanisms and writing countless queries or programs to decipher the data to help you make the right decisions. To further assist with data analysis, you can use the SQL Workload Analysis add-on to analyze workloads of your database systems and provide additional insights on performance improvements.
There are several things that database administrators do on a day-to-day basis. Some tasks are procedural, like setting up maintenance tasks, rolling out code, setting up security, loading data, making configuration changes, etc. But you spend a good amount of time on monitoring, analyzing and fixing issues to make sure databases are an asset and not a limitation. Would you not rather spend your time fixing problems instead of setting up data collection and analysis processes?
There are so many aspects of SQL Server that could affect performance, data integrity, and usefulness of applications that database administrators need to monitor and troubleshoot, and here are some of those items:
- Blocking
- Deadlocks
- Tempdb contention
- Availability Group issues
- Configuration changes
- Failed jobs
- Timeouts
- Resource issues like input/output, memory, and central processing unit
- Long running queries
- Execution plan regression
- Missing indexes
- Index fragmentation
Any of these items can occur anytime. Therefore, the ability for SQL Diagnostic Manager to collect data non-stop and provide a historical repository allows you to look at issues that are happening right now or something that occurred an hour ago, a week ago or longer.
Another limiting factor to a database administrator is that you can only work on one thing at a time. But you still have several SQL Server instances and databases to manage. How can you determine what is critical and needs immediate attention versus focusing on a known issue? Are you proactive and address things as they arise or are you reactive and wait for someone else to let you know there is a problem?
For more information, please refer to the solution brief “Keep your SQL Servers running smoothly with SQL Diagnostic Manager” by Greg Robidoux from MSSQLTips.