December last year saw the first release of the SQL Monitor v3 Early Access Program (EAP). This is a way for us to release early builds of what will become the next version of SQL Monitor, and allow people to use it and give us feedback while we’re still developing the software. The comments and suggestions from users can then directly influence the final release.
The first EAP contained a lean implementation of our new ‘Custom Metrics and Alerts’ feature. This gives users the ability to run custom T-SQL against their databases, monitor the data and receive alerts when the data breaches the defined thresholds. We wanted to get the bare bones of the feature out as soon as possible so we could begin getting feedback as we continued to work on the feature.
What’s in the next EAP?
We’ll have an improved version of the Custom metrics and alerts feature in the forthcoming EAP.
We’ve also asked for suggestions on what you’d like to see in v3 via SQL Monitor Uservoice. The most commonly requested feature has been the ability to have multiple levels of user, for example, a “’guest’ user who could review the data that was collected but not modify the settings”. So we’ve been working on this feature and it should also be in the next EAP. Again, we’re interested to hear your thoughts on it.
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone that has given us feedback so far and we’re also grateful for everyone that enabled the automatic error and feature usage reporting which are particularly useful ways for us to receive technical feedback from the EAP without requiring effort from the user.
If you’d like to sign up to the next EAP, please email SQL Monitor and we’ll send you the details.
SQL Monitor v3 Early Access Program update
Last week we sent out the third of our Early Access Program releases (you can still sign up for the SQL Monitor EAP and get the latest release). There is a new feature – user roles – and an update to the custom metrics and alerts feature.
User roles:
The most requested feature via SQL Monitor Uservoice has been the ability to have multiple levels of user. However, during our research we heard several times that adding a new set of accounts to manage could potentially be a headache. So we designed with simplicity in mind.
There are now three levels of user:
Administrator – full control including control of user access to SQL Monitor
Standard user - limited access, but can for example manage alerts and configure alert settings
Read-only – can’t configure any settings but can view most areas except the Licensing page etc
The Administrator role is created on intial login. The Administrator can then optionally create the other two levels of access. Each role is activated by a single password that you share with relevant users, avoiding the ‘headache’ of multiple user accounts with specific roles and privelages allocated to them.
We’ve had many suggestions for additional functionality around this feature – for example, extending the control to instance level access or integration with Active Directory – and we’ll certainly consider these suggestions carefully when we’re deciding what goes into a future release. For now, we hope the additional levels of access will provide a useful way of restricting access to parts of SQL Monitor.
Custom metrics and alerts
This new feature, updated in the latest EAP, is one of those features an administrator might wish to restrict access to. It allows the user to make collections from their servers and then receive alerts when certain threshold values are passed.
We’ve made changes to this in the latest EAP. The feature now uses a three page wizard to allow users to:
1. define the metric
2. optionally create an alert based on the metric
3. see a summary before saving them.
We’ve added the ability to choose which databases to run the T-SQL against:
And to test the T-SQL to make sure it is returning a single numeric value:
It’s also possible to create the metrics and alerts in disabled states – for example, you might want to create a metric and an alert but save the alert in a disabled state so you can evaluate the metric before you decide it’s ready to fire alerts.
To support the feature we’ve made available several ready-to-use example metrics and alerts – such as a metric to collect rate of change of database file size in MB/hour with an accompanying alert when the database file size has increased beyond certain thresholds.
Please continue to let us know what you think of the new features and what you think can be improved and we’ll keep you updated on developments…