SQL Monitor – development update

Here’s an update on what the SQL Monitor Development Team have been working on just recently for version 3.2 and beyond.

Custom metrics library

Since developing the custom metrics feature, we’ve seen it put to some interesting uses, ranging from simple but effective reality checks (Time since last restore) to complex scripts giving insights into query plan performance (Number of ascending statistics) . We decided it would be useful to gather some of these and put them somewhere for other people to use and hopefully add their own too.

We could have simply posted these scripts up on an existing resource, but we wanted to make it especially easy to use these metrics in SQL Monitor, so we felt it justified having its own site. This also gave us the freedom to implement the ‘Install metric’ functionality, allowing users of SQL Monitor 3.0 and later to export the T-SQL and associated settings directly into the app from the website.

We’re delighted to already have contributions from Jonathan Allen who gave the feature some early thrashing and was quick off the blocks providing his own custom metrics, Fabiano Amorim, TJay Belt, Stuart Ainsworth, Louis Davidson, Brad McGehee and Grant Fritchey who when he saw the prototype was moved to say ‘this is pretty cool’. We’re grateful for the feedback, support and contributions.

We’re hoping these custom metrics help people broaden their range of monitoring and that they’ll share their own metrics with us so we can put them on the site for others to use. There’ll be more news on this coming soon. Meanwhile, let us know if you think there’s anything we can do to improve the experience.

Fixes and enhancements

We are always looking at ways to improve SQL Monitor and we keep a close eye on the suggestions on our UserVoice site. Although the getting the metrics site live promptly required some intensive development, we did find some time for a few fixes and enhancements to the application. Most obvious of these tweaks is the ordering of databases by name rather than ID. It made sense to group the system databases at the top of the list, but below that the user DBs are ordered alphabetically (granted, the ability to sort would be even more useful and maybe that’ll make it into a future release).

Here’s how to upgrade to 3.2 or download a free trial.

Hosted Monitor

Next, we’re focusing on a hosted version of SQL Monitor where a service is installed close to your DBs and then we take care of the resources needed to power the monitoring. We’re hoping this will help those who find the main barriers to monitoring include the initial set up costs and time required, the on-going maintenance of the hardware and the long-term investment. By taking care of all the hardware, we’re aiming to make it quick and easy to start monitoring and provide it for a monthly subscription to make it less of an up front commitment.

If you’d like to find out more, try the forthcoming beta release or get involved in a feedback session, then sign up.