It is the last thing on the to-do list before a leadership check-in: pull the latest numbers, take a few screenshots, paste them into a...
It is the last thing on the to-do list before a leadership check-in: pull the latest numbers, take a few screenshots, paste them into a slide, write a paragraph that sounds more confident than the underlying data actually feels. Multiply that by every recurring stakeholder update a DBA team owns — a monthly ops review, a weekly status email, a quarterly capacity report — and reporting quietly becomes one of the largest recurring, non-technical time sinks on the team’s calendar.
SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server (SQL DM) was built to remove that entire manual step, and the IDERA tutorial Creating SQL Reports with SQL Diagnostic Manager walks through exactly how — from the built-in report library through to scheduling a report for fully automatic email delivery.
Scheduled reporting in SQL Diagnostic Manager automatically generates and distributes SQL Server performance reports on a recurring schedule — daily, weekly, or monthly — to whoever needs them, without a manual export, screenshot, or on-demand data pull. Reports can be deployed to SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) so they are generated and emailed on their own, on a schedule a team defines once.
Creating SQL Reports with SQL Diagnostic Manager
SQL DM’s reporting module takes the performance data the platform is already collecting and turns it into stakeholder-ready output, on a schedule, with no manual assembly. In practical terms, it can:
Manual reporting works, in a narrow sense, right up until it does not scale. A single monthly update to one manager is a manageable, if mildly annoying, task. The problem is that stakeholder requests rarely stay singular. A DBA team that starts with one recurring email to one director often ends up, a year later, maintaining a patchwork of slightly different updates: a weekly note to an application owner, a monthly deck for an infrastructure review, an ad hoc export whenever a security or compliance question comes up. Each one is built the same manual way — log in, pull the numbers, format them, send them — and each one is a small, recurring tax on time that could go toward actual database work.
There is a second, quieter cost. Manual reporting is inconsistent by nature. The report that goes out depends on whoever is available to build it that week, which metrics they remember to include, and how much time they have before the deadline. Leadership ends up comparing updates that are not really apples-to-apples month over month, which undermines exactly the kind of trend visibility a recurring report is supposed to provide in the first place.
SQL DM stores every metric it collects — CPU, memory, disk I/O, wait time, batch requests, and dozens of other counters — in its own repository database. Because that data already exists in one place, generating a report is not a separate collection effort; it is simply a query against data SQL DM is already gathering.
The reporting module groups its built-in reports by category, each with a short description to help a new user pick the right one. The Enterprise Summary Report rolls up the health of every monitored instance into a single view, useful for a leadership audience that wants the big picture rather than instance-level detail. The Server Summary Report drills into a single SQL Server instance over a chosen time window, useful for an application owner who only cares about the system running their workload.
Any report can be exported on the spot to Excel or PDF for a one-time request. But the feature that removes reporting from the recurring to-do list entirely is the “Schedule Email” option available directly from the reports console. Clicking it opens the reports deployment wizard, which walks through: who the report should be emailed to, the subject line, and the time it should run — followed by a step to point the wizard at an SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) instance and confirm authentication for the underlying data source. A final summary screen confirms the deployment options before SQL DM hands the report off to SSRS to run on its own, on schedule, from that point forward.
A stronger stakeholder report draws on the same performance signals SQL DM already tracks for diagnostics and alerting:
Setting up scheduled reporting does not have to be a large project, and treating it that way is usually why it gets postponed indefinitely. The following workflow keeps it to a single short setup session:
| Scheduled Reporting Can | The DBA Must Determine |
|---|---|
| Generate and email a report automatically, on a recurring schedule | Which stakeholders actually need a recurring update, and how often |
| Roll up enterprise-wide or single-instance health into a ready-made report | Which built-in report matches a given audience’s level of detail |
| Include any collected metric, including custom counters, in a custom report | Which metrics matter enough to a specific stakeholder to include |
| Deploy to SSRS for hands-off, recurring delivery | How the SSRS environment and data-source authentication are configured |
| Export any report on demand for a one-off request | When an ad hoc export is warranted versus adding a new scheduled subscription |
Scheduled reporting removes the manual work. The DBA still owns the audience and the content.
Most SQL Server monitoring platforms can produce some form of report or dashboard view. Turning that into a recurring, hands-off delivery to a stakeholder’s inbox is where the practical difference shows up: some tools require exporting into a separate reporting or BI layer, or leave the “send this on a schedule” step as a manual task the DBA still owns.
SQL Diagnostic Manager’s reports deploy directly to SQL Server Reporting Services for scheduled email delivery, with no separate reporting stack to stand up and no license upgrade required. For SQL Server-centric teams that want their stakeholder reporting handled without adding a recurring task or a new tool to the environment, that is the differentiated story: zero manual effort, and predictable, low-effort visibility for leadership.
Automating a recurring task is easy to under-sell internally because the win is time given back rather than a new capability with a demo-friendly screen. A few numbers are worth tracking from the start:
None of this requires new tooling — a before/after comparison of hours spent on reporting tends to be the most persuasive artifact for getting buy-in to schedule the next stakeholder update, and the next one after that, until manual reporting is the exception rather than the routine.
Do I need SQL Server Reporting Services already running to schedule a report?
Yes, SQL DM deploys scheduled reports to an existing SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) instance. Most SQL Server environments already have SSRS available; the deployment wizard walks through pointing SQL DM at it and confirming data-source authentication.
Can different stakeholders receive different reports?
Yes. SQL DM’s built-in reports range from enterprise-wide summaries to single-instance detail, and custom reports can be built from any collected counter, so a leadership audience and a technical audience can each receive a report matched to what they actually need.
How long does it take to set up a scheduled report?
Most teams schedule their first report in well under an hour, since the underlying data collection is already in place — scheduling is a configuration step, not a new deployment.
Does scheduled reporting require professional services to configure?
No. Report scheduling is part of the existing SQL DM license and is configured directly from the reports console using the built-in deployment wizard.
Can I still export a report manually if I need one right away?
Yes. Every report, scheduled or not, can be exported on demand to Excel or PDF for a one-time request, alongside any recurring scheduled subscriptions already in place.
Stakeholder reporting does not have to be something a DBA team rebuilds by hand every week or month. If your team is still pulling screenshots and compiling numbers on demand today, the fastest way to find out how much time is buried in that routine is to schedule your single most frequent stakeholder report and see what disappears from next month’s to-do list.
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Talk to your account team about setting up scheduled stakeholder reports
Knowledge Base
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Brandon Adams - 22 June
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Brandon Adams - 20 June
Knowledge Base
Brandon Adams - 19 June
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