Author Archives: Ben.Rees

New Alerts Pt 1 (of 3)

By Ben.Rees | Published: March 9, 2010
I’ve spent the last few weeks investigating the alerts that the new v2 product will offer, in particular the new alerts that are not currently available in v1. SQL Response v2 will provide a number of Overviews for SQL Server Instances summarising activity on those servers. For example, a number of Perfmon counters (Buffer Cache [...]
Posted in Alert, Metrics | Tagged | 2 Comments

Back to the Future

By Ben.Rees | Published: February 9, 2010
Going Back to the Future of Monitoring this week, I’ve been doing some separate work investigating SQL Azure (we have a Beta of SQL Compare for SQL Azure this week – sign up here to try it out) and have been trying to find out how popular the new platform is. So far the answer [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 1 Comment

SQL Profiler and Trace

By Ben.Rees | Published: January 26, 2010
As part of SQL Response V2 we’ll be collecting all sorts of data that allows the user to see what is happening on SQL instances monitored by the product. However, obviously, we have a delicate balancing act to perform – we want to maximise the information we obtain whilst minimising the impact on the monitored [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 7 Comments

Logins and Permissions

By Ben.Rees | Published: January 20, 2010
SQL Response v1, like many other monitoring tools, doesn’t require the user to login when accessing the application. Just double-click on the SQL Response icon on your desktop, and you’re in, monitoring servers and checking for problems. As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, SQL Response v2 will use a web interface instead of the previous Windows fat [...]
Posted in Security | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

SQL Server Express

By Ben.Rees | Published: January 6, 2010
Many organisations do, of course, have a wide range of SQL Server versions and editions across their environments – we’ve seen a very wide range across development, staging and, of course, production servers, even within the same organisation. However, we did have quite a lengthy discussion a couple of weeks back about the use of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 5 Comments

Priorities for SQL Response 2

By Ben.Rees | Published: November 25, 2009
One of the things I noticed whilst attending a number of presentations at last weekend’s SQLBits (http://sqlbits.com/ – thank you to the organisers for such a great conference) was a significant amount of variety in the SQL Server monitoring tools currently on the market. In particular I noticed that the emphasis of the different tools [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments

Future of Monitoring at SQL Bits

By Ben.Rees | Published: November 18, 2009
Just a quick message to say that it would be great to meet up with any Future of Monitoring followers at SQL Bits this week. I’ll be there Friday and Saturday, including Friday and Saturday evenings. In fact Red Gate are sponsoring the drinks event on Saturday evening, so please come along to talk about [...]
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Our third monitoring dashboard entry!

By Ben.Rees | Published: October 6, 2009
We’ve had another great entry for our dashboard competition, this one from Jonathan Allen. This submission contains some more conceptual designs, looking at possible approaches to representing high-level status information on a dashboard. There are three parts to the entry: Aero View of Monitored Entities This view would not be dissimilar to the Aero view [...]
Posted in Design A Dashboard | 5 Comments