Microsoft SQL Servers are a favorite among organizations, but as the user base grows, the architecture and increasing workloads make it difficult for admins to keep an eye on all the components and deployments in real time.
Applications Manager's SQL monitoring capabilities helps you keep an eye on your entire SQL server estate, so you can identify performance issues and locate their root causes effortlessly. With its extensive reports and prompt alerting, Applications Manager helps you become aware of potential issues before they impact your users.
SQL monitoring plays a crucial role in identifying and addressing performance issues regardless of whether your databases are hosted on premises, in the cloud, or both. Here are some common performance issues that can be detected through Applications Manager's SQL monitoring capabilities:
The SQL Server query rate determines how fast the associated application can make itself available to end users. Whenever there is a delay in querying, it directly affects the performance of the application processes. Slow queries can be due to several factors:
Applications Manager's SQL performance tuning capabilities help you monitor and optimize SQL queries to function at their maximum efficiency. With detailed reports on performance indicators, like blocked queries, most frequently executed queries, and slow queries, you can identify and resolve anomalies efficiently. Monitoring metrics, like CPU utilization, wait time, query plan usage, and memory usage statistics, from a single screen helps you correlate performance interdependencies and quickly locate the root cause of poor query performance.
In addition, our SQL monitoring dashboard also provides a user impact score to help you understand a missing index's impact on server performance and pinpoint opportunities for improvement.
SQL Server is one of the most widely used relational database management systems due its multi-functionality and the plethora of features it incorporates to support software applications. However, this poses a challenge when it comes to identifying what's causing performance degradation, as there can be many potential contributing factors. Some factors that lead to poor SQL database performance are:
With Applications Manager's real-time monitoring features, you can track each KPI, like jobs, sessions, backups, replications, locks, and latches, and receive instant alerts in case of a threshold breach or anomaly. The graphical and tabulated analyses of the performance of key components help you identify and resolve slow algorithms and processes. You can monitor scan methods and keep an eye on the cache system, ensuring a hit rate of at least 90% for high performance. You'll be informed on the performance of the memory and disk statistics to make sure your SQL Server environment is well maintained to avoid any performance downtime.
In addition to weeding out the components responsible for delayed response time, our SQL monitoring software has a panel that enables you to manually configure each resource to get the best performance output.
Constant data growth within SQL Server poses a huge threat, often resulting in memory overload and preventing new data from being written onto the disk. Monitoring SQL database-specific metrics, like cache, replication, query, buffer, and backup, can help you understand the server's memory allocation and consumption for each cluster that is deployed and active. Applications Manager's ML-based adaptive thresholds keep up with the dynamic resource consumption trends, offering alerts at three severity levels to ensure timely fixes. This smart alerting system enables you to automate responsive actions for threshold breaches, reducing alert noise.
SQL users often face connectivity issues during logins. In most cases, this is due to a access restriction from an already existing connection. This can cause an overload of active sessions connected to the database, preventing new logins from accessing the specific SQL Server.
Applications Manager's SQL monitor provides an outstanding activity monitoring interface that can track every single login and its status. The SQL activity monitor also offers a clear view of SQL monitoring metrics, like cluster health, nodes deployed, sessions, jobs, replicas, files, availability groups, and backups.
Deadlocks are events that take place whenever multiple transactions are queued up at the same time to prevent a conflict in data being written. Blocks occur when a single lock is requested by more than one active session to avoid concurrent usage of a resource. These are the events that make the SQL databases failsafe. But when numerous transactions and locks are blocked frequently, the wait time can slow performance.
Applications Manager offers elaborate insights about deadlock rate, block time, and queries that are being declined of locks or other resources, and average execution time for each SQL database. The SQL performance monitor helps you understand the execution anomalies and fix them before the overall performance of the SQL Server is affected.
In a disparate architecture like that of an SQL database, a simple glitch could take the whole server down. To avoid such failures and improve availability, secondary backups or replica databases take over. Additionally, the AlwaysOn Availability Group function in SQL Server helps you increase the overall availability of the database network. Such vast infrastructure and secondary backups and replicas, along with the humongous data storage systems, can make it difficult for you to keep up with performance trends and anomalies in the ecosystem.
To provide visibility into the entire database cluster, SQL database monitoring tools like Applications Manager have dedicated panels for each memory subset. Applications Manager keeps track of the backup's expiry information, as well as stores and retrieves locations, since discrepancies could lead to backup data failure. Similarly, it also checks the synchronization mode of replicas, their data delivery speed, and readiness in case of a failover. Monitoring your SQL Server environment using tools like Applications Manager makes it possible to keep a close watch on log shipping for ensuring prompt replication of data into the standby server without triggering error warnings.
It allows us to track crucial metrics such as response times, resource utilization, error rates, and transaction performance. The real-time monitoring alerts promptly notify us of any issues or anomalies, enabling us to take immediate action.
Reviewer Role: Research and Development
Tech Support Manager, Lexmark