Monitoring SQL Server - For Free!

Featuring MSSQLTips Speaker - Andy Warren

Monitoring SQL Server is a combination of knowing what you need to monitor in your environment and how to accomplish that monitoring. For most of us, we'll need a way to detect blocking, deadlocks, finding long running queries, failed logins, and failed jobs as a start, plus a way to capture more detail of how the system is being used at both the hardware and software level.

This presentation is targeted at those new to monitoring and will look at built-in capabilities such as reports in SSMS, sp_who, Profiler and Extend Events, plus we'll look at Perfmon and PAL as a way to monitor and capture lots of metrics related to server performance and SQL Server itself. The goal is to get you thinking about what is possible and what you might need to solve current problems, it also shows that while there are lots of options, free doesn't always mean easy or comprehensive.