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SQL diagnostic manager: Real-time Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics for SQL Server

Idera's SQL diagnostic manager (SQLdm) provides a powerful way to manage, administer, and troubleshoot your SQL Server environment. With a wealth of real-time SQL Server performance information and deep diagnostics at your fingertips, you can increase availability and speed time-to-recovery. From a central point of control, you can pinpoint, investigate, and diagnose SQL Server performance and availability problems – including common issues like long-running queries and worst-performing stored procedures. You can then quickly take preemptive action if necessary. The extensive historical metrics that SQL diagnostic manager provides will also streamline and simplify strategic planning such as capacity planning and trend analysis. SQL diagnostic manager will drastically reduce tedious administrative time and help both experienced and novice DBAs increase productivity.

Why SQL diagnostic manager?

In many organizations today, SQL Server supports business critical applications and DBAs are required to ensure performance and availability, and support constantly growing SQL Server deployments with constrained resources. To ensure optimum performance, administrators need reliable SQL Server information. SQLdm provides a new level of flexibility and responsiveness when it comes to managing a SQL Server infrastructure. SQLdm monitors the performance of all SQL Servers in real time and provides the most comprehensive SQL Server diagnostics on the market – enabling DBAs to receive immediate alerts, troubleshoot, and resolve problems quickly.

Key Benefits

Increases SQL Server availability – Enables DBAs and other administrators to quickly investigate, diagnose and correct performance and availability problems. On-screen recovery tasks make it easy to solve a problem once diagnosed. Convenient tasks include start/stop a SQL Agent job, stop a blocking process, terminate a user connection, or rebuild an index on a table.

Provides real–time monitoring from a Web browser – Manage one or hundreds of SQL Servers anytime, anywhere. The SQLdm Web Console enables DBAs to monitor the performance of SQL Servers in real time from the office, home, or local internet café.

Provides a comprehensive view of current performance – Collects and displays extensive real-time activity and performance information for processes, caches, alerts, memory, transactions, logs, locks, replication, reorganization status and trace data.

Gathers data across multiple servers simultaneously – Collects and sorts data, enabling you to view information for one server or for the entire environment. You can easily identify the worst-performing stored procedures across all your servers or learn whether a SQL Agent maintenance job has failed on one server or all simultaneously.

Stores data in a Metrics Repository – Metrics from across the SQL Server enterprise are stored in a central repository, enabling DBAs to create a variety of reports for strategic analysis – such as trend analysis, capacity planning, data comparison, data correlation, and forecasting.

Supplies continuous unattended monitoring – SQLdm monitors your mission-critical SQL applications 24 x 7 whether a DBA is logged in or not. A powerful service-driven collection and alerting engine keeps DBAs informed even while away.

Improves the productivity of both skilled and novice DBAs – Delivers organized data views with built-in data collection. These views eliminate the need to apply complex system commands, while built-in features detail exactly what the interface displays.

Offers easy installation and use – Installs quickly and supports a mixed environment of Windows integrated security and SQL Server native security. A typical installation and configuration will take less than 30 minutes.

Key Features

• Analyzes performance trends using real-time and historical data to identify abnormal operating states
• Offers simple, no-agent installation with continuous, secure data collection from a background service
• Provides more than 15 screens organizing current status and performance information into easy-to-use diagnostic data
• Identifies the worst-performing stored procedures, SQL statements and SQL batches during a specified period
• Provides server categorization capabilities used to selectively view specific servers via grid views – server group, application group, department, location
• Provides a flexible and customizable grid view that displays all monitoring data for both the server and database that can be customized and saved, shared across multiple SQLdm instances, and exported into CSV formatted files for easy reporting and analysis
• Displays current process list, including which process is using the most resources. SQLdm also provides drilldown to a live trace of any process and permits either the process or the user connection to the server to be terminated
• Monitors selected processes to ensure that no single one consumes more than a predefined percentage of hardware resources during a designated period on the SQL Server instances being monitored
• Enhanced management of alerts and settings with the ability to apply a single alert or setting entry to any number of monitored servers
• Uses SNMP alerting to dispatch alerts directly to enterprise management frameworks like Tivoli, OpenView and UniCenter
• Identifies the process at the head of the blocking chain for easy resolution
• Supplies extensive views of current SQL Server status and performance, including SQL Agent jobs, SQL error log, full-text catalogs, memory utilization, open transactions, performance, problem locks, procedure cache, processes, reorganization status and replication details
• Provides recovery tasks including stopping processes, disconnecting user connections, starting/stopping SQL Agent jobs, rebuilding indices and updating statistics
• Displays objects dependent on tables — and vice-versa — to help you avoid errors in object modification

Web Console Key Features

• Allows multiple users to track SQL Server performance anytime, anywhere from a read-only Web console
• Monitors hundreds of SQL Server instances in real-time using easy-to-define custom server groups
• Uses drill-down views that capture statistics about individual SQL Server databases, allowing you to gather deep diagnostic data, such as:
  • CPU, memory and network utilization
  • Processes, locks, open transactions and procedure cache
  • Job summary and history
  • SQL Server logs
  • Database statistics
• Offers quick deployment
• Provides an easy-to-learn user interface that leverages the familiar Microsoft Outlook 2003 style

System Requirements

• Intel Pentium 900-MHz processor or equivalent
• 256MB RAM
• 36MB drive space plus 34MB for each monitored server
• Internet Explorer 5.5 or later
• Windows 2000, Windows XP or Windows Server 2003
• Monitor capable of displaying 16-bit color or greater and a resolution of 800 x 600

Web Console Server System Requirements

• Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003
• ASP.Net 1.1
• Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 or later

Web Console Client System Requirements

• Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP Professional
• ASP.Net 1.1
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or later, with Active Scripting and Java support enabled
• Adobe Reader 5.0 or later

Supported Environments

• SQL Server v7.0, SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005, including 64-bit SQL Server on the operating systems they support

SQL diagnostic manager does not install any components, DLLs, scripts, stored procedures or tables on the SQL Server instances being monitored.