SQL DIAGNOSTIC MANAGER FOR SQL SERVER
SQL Server Monitoring Use Cases
See how database teams use SQL Diagnostic Manager to cut alert noise, catch problems before they page you, and get straight to the fix — agentlessly, and without ingest fees.
Fully functional for 14 days — no credit card required.
JUMP TO A USE CASE
Rewind to the Moment Things Went Wrong
Keep Replication Health in the Same View as Everything Else
Spot Availability Group Risk Before It Becomes a Failover
See Beyond the SQL Layer
Get Prescriptive Fixes, Not Just Alerts
Track the Metrics That Actually Matter to Your Business
Report to Stakeholders Automatically
Eliminate Alert Fatigue
Turn generic tripwires into a server-specific signal
Feature: Baseline & Dynamic Thresholds
Static, one-size-fits-all thresholds are the reason most alert fatigue exists in the first place. A CPU threshold tuned to look reasonable across thousands of environments fires constantly on a healthy, busy server and stays silent on a quiet one that has quietly drifted into trouble. Teams either drown in noise or widen the thresholds until alerts only fire after something has already broken.
SQL Diagnostic Manager learns what normal performance actually looks like for each individual SQL Server instance and adjusts alert thresholds dynamically, instead of relying on the same static values across your entire estate. Alerting stops being a generic tripwire and becomes a signal specific to that server, at that time, on that day.
- Fewer false-positive alerts, because thresholds adjust to each server’s own baseline instead of a generic default
- Transparent, explainable threshold recommendations DBAs can inspect and override — not a black-box machine-learning model
- Faster root-cause analysis once something does fire, because “normal” for that server is already defined
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server, all supported deployment types
Automate the Response, Not Just the Alert
Turn a notification into a resolved issue before anyone has to look
Feature: Alert Actions & Automated Responses
Most monitoring tools stop at email. An alert fires, it lands in an inbox, and someone still has to notice it, investigate it, and act — often hours after the underlying problem started, especially overnight or over a weekend when nobody is watching the inbox.
SQL Diagnostic Manager can go well beyond a notification: when a threshold is breached, it can automatically execute a remediation script, create a ServiceNow ticket, page the on-call team, or send an SNMP trap — configured per metric, per server, or across the whole environment. Many issues get resolved, or at least fully documented, before a person ever has to respond.
- Configure automated responses per metric, per server, or environment-wide, starting with one critical metric and expanding from there
- Route directly into the tools your team already uses — ServiceNow tickets, SNMP traps, paging, or a custom remediation script
- Shift from reactive firefighting to issues that resolve themselves, or arrive already documented, before users notice
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Plan Storage Capacity Ahead of Time
Catch storage shortfalls weeks or months out, not at 2 a.m.
Feature: Forecasting & Capacity Planning
Running low on disk space rarely announces itself politely — it shows up as a middle-of-the-night page after performance has already degraded or a database has already stopped accepting writes. Without forward-looking visibility into growth trends, storage planning becomes reactive by default.
SQL Diagnostic Manager’s Disk Space Usage Forecast tracks current and historical disk growth trends and projects them forward, using either linear or exponential (aggressive) forecasting depending on how a given workload actually grows — giving DBAs a clearer, data-driven view of future storage needs instead of a guess. That same visibility helps size new environments and cloud or on-premises migrations before they happen, not after.
- Forecast future disk space needs from historical growth trends instead of gut instinct
- Choose linear or exponential forecasting to match how a specific workload actually grows
- Size new environments and migrations with a clearer view of the storage footprint you will need
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
See Exactly Who’s Doing What, Right Now
Stop reconstructing incidents after the fact from partial logs
Feature: Session Monitoring
When something is clearly wrong with SQL Server performance but it is not obvious who or what is causing it, most teams start hunting through logs after the fact, trying to reconstruct what happened from incomplete information.
SQL Diagnostic Manager gives a live view of everything happening on a SQL Server instance right now — who is connected, what application they are running, what queries are executing, how long they have been running, and what resources they are consuming — including blocking chains, visible in real time as they form.
- See every active connection, running query, and resource consumer in one live view, no log reconstruction required
- Identify blocking chains as they happen, not after a user has already reported the slowdown
- Use the same view proactively, to catch emerging patterns before they turn into an incident
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Resolve Deadlocks in Minutes, Not Hours
Stop reconstructing blocking chains by hand from trace flags and extended events
Feature: Deadlock Detection & Analysis
When a deadlock hits production, every minute spent manually piecing together which session or query caused it is a minute the business feels the impact. Reconstructing that chain from trace flags or extended events output is slow, and it is exactly the kind of work a DBA is doing under the worst possible time pressure.
SQL Diagnostic Manager’s blocking and deadlock views show blocked sessions, lead blockers, and total deadlocks at a glance, with deadlock detail exportable in XDL format for deeper developer-side analysis, plus built-in prescriptive guidance that points toward the session or query behind the deadlock rather than leaving a DBA to piece it together alone.
- See blocked sessions, lead blockers, and total deadlocks at a glance instead of reconstructing them from raw trace data
- Export deadlock detail in XDL format for deeper analysis by developers or DBAs
- Get built-in guidance pointing toward the session or query behind a deadlock, not just a raw data dump
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Pinpoint Exactly Where the Pressure Is Coming From
Move past “the server is slow” to “this application is the cause”
Feature: Wait Statistics Analysis
Knowing that a SQL Server instance is under pressure is one thing. Knowing which specific database, which application, and which query is actually driving that pressure is a completely different — and far more useful — piece of information, and it is one most teams never get past instance-level wait data to find.
SQL Diagnostic Manager slices wait statistics across multiple dimensions — by database, by user, by application, and by individual query — so a team can hand a finding directly to the right owner instead of guessing where to start.
- Break down wait time by database, user, application, and query, not just the overall instance
- Hand application or infrastructure teams a specific finding instead of a vague “the database is slow”
- Resolve performance conversations in a fraction of the time it takes to work backward from a raw wait total
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Catch TempDB Problems Before They Cause Failures
Stop finding out about TempDB the way most teams do — after it fails
Feature: TempDB Monitoring
TempDB is one of the most shared, contention-prone resources in SQL Server, and for most teams it is the last place anyone looks until queries start failing and TempDB is already out of space.
SQL Diagnostic Manager includes dedicated TempDB monitoring that tracks space usage, session-level consumption, version store growth, and allocation contention in one focused view — visibility that is already included in the license, not an add-on most teams realize they have.
- Track TempDB space usage, session consumption, version store growth, and contention in one place
- Get proactive alerts on TempDB pressure instead of discovering it only after a query fails
- Turn a historically reactive, invisible problem into something caught and managed ahead of time
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Rewind to the Moment Things Went Wrong
Replace “what do you remember happening” with actual data
Feature: History Browser
When a performance issue gets reported after the fact — users noticed slowness yesterday afternoon, for example — most teams are stuck piecing together what happened from memory, partial logs, or nothing at all.
SQL Diagnostic Manager’s History Browser lets a team navigate back to any point in their collected monitoring history and see exactly what the environment looked like at that moment: active sessions, query performance, wait statistics, and resource usage, frozen in time. It is just as useful for before-and-after comparisons — deploy an index, patch a server, or run a schema change, then go back and compare with confidence.
- Replay any past moment in the environment’s monitoring history, not just a log line
- Turn post-incident conversations with leadership or vendors into a data review instead of a guess
- Validate changes with real before-and-after comparisons, not assumptions
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Keep Replication Health in the Same View as Everything Else
Stop being the last to know when replication quietly drifts
Feature: Replication Monitoring
Teams relying on native SQL Server tools or manual checks for replication health are typically the last to know when something is quietly drifting out of sync — often not until replication lag has already become a business problem.
SQL Diagnostic Manager monitors replication health — latency, distributor status, and agent activity — inside the same interface a team already uses for performance monitoring, already included in the license. Alerting on latency thresholds catches drift before it becomes visible to the business.
- Monitor replication latency, distributor status, and agent health alongside everything else, in one interface
- Get proactive alerts on latency thresholds instead of relying on a separate manual check
- Consolidate a process many teams do not realize is already included in their SQL Diagnostic Manager license
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Spot Availability Group Risk Before It Becomes a Failover
The early warning signs are almost always there — if something is watching for them
Feature: AlwaysOn Availability Group Monitoring
AlwaysOn Availability Group failures are high-impact, high-visibility events, and they are almost always preceded by subtle, detectable signals that native tooling does not surface clearly or consistently.
SQL Diagnostic Manager provides deep visibility into AG health — synchronization state, log send and redo queue depth, replica status, and failover readiness — so teams running mission-critical availability groups can catch a synchronization issue before it becomes an actual failover event.
- Monitor synchronization state, log send/redo queue depth, and replica status in one view
- Get ahead of failover risk instead of finding out during the failover itself
- Bring a Solutions Architect into configuration for AGs specifically — the setup details matter and the stakes are real
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
See Beyond the SQL Layer
Because a slow query isn’t always a SQL problem
Feature: VM & Virtualization Awareness
A slow query does not always have a SQL Server cause. If a VM is being throttled, memory is being reclaimed by the hypervisor, or the host is under disk pressure, the real fix is not inside SQL Server at all — and without host-level visibility, teams can spend hours tuning a query that was never the actual problem.
SQL Diagnostic Manager surfaces hypervisor-level metrics — CPU ready time, memory ballooning, and host-level disk latency — alongside SQL metrics, across VMware and Hyper-V. It is visibility most SQL-only monitoring tools miss entirely, and it is often the difference between finding the actual root cause and chasing a symptom indefinitely.
- See CPU ready time, memory ballooning, and host-level disk latency next to SQL Server metrics, not in a separate tool
- Have an informed conversation with the VM or infrastructure team backed by data, not a hunch
- Stop spending hours tuning queries when the real bottleneck is one layer down, at the host
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server, VMware and Hyper-V environments
Get Prescriptive Fixes, Not Just Alerts
Move from “something’s wrong” to “here’s what to do about it”
Feature: Prescriptive Recommendations
Plenty of monitoring tools stop at the alert. They tell a DBA that something is wrong and leave the entire root-cause investigation — and the fix — up to them. That gap is where hours disappear during an incident, and it is where less experienced team members get stuck the longest.
SQL Diagnostic Manager’s AI-powered performance optimization is built to close that gap. Rather than a red indicator and nothing else, it delivers prescriptive tuning guidance that points toward specific, actionable next steps, so a DBA spends less time diagnosing and more time fixing — while staying firmly in control of whether and how to apply the recommendation.
- Move from a generic alert to a specific, actionable recommendation
- Spend less time on manual root-cause investigation for common performance issues
- Review and apply AI-driven recommendations on your own terms — guidance, not an unsupervised automated fix
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Track the Metrics That Actually Matter to Your Business
Correlate SQL performance with the business metrics your team is already watching
Feature: Custom Counters
Standard SQL Server counters show what is happening inside the database engine, but not how that connects to the application or business metrics an operations team is actually watching. Without a way to bring those together, teams end up manually cross-referencing multiple tools and spreadsheets every time they need to answer a simple question: is the slow query causing the drop in transaction throughput, or the other way around?
SQL Diagnostic Manager is not limited to standard SQL Server counters. Teams can pull in Windows Performance Monitor counters, query custom DMVs, or track virtually any application-specific value, all displayed alongside SQL metrics in one unified view — one of the most underused capabilities in the product.
- Correlate SQL performance with business-layer behavior — for example, tying query response times to transaction throughput — in a single view
- Pull in Windows Performance Monitor counters and custom DMV queries without waiting on a product release
- Extend monitoring to virtually any value that matters in your environment, not just what ships in the box
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Report to Stakeholders Automatically
Stop compiling screenshots and start scheduling delivery
Feature: Scheduled Reporting for Stakeholders
Manual reporting eats hours every month: exporting charts, assembling a deck, and sending it around, only to have the data already be stale by the time it lands in someone’s inbox. Multiply that across every stakeholder who wants a different view of the same environment, and reporting becomes a part-time job nobody signed up for.
SQL Diagnostic Manager can generate and automatically distribute performance reports on a schedule — daily, weekly, or monthly — to whoever needs them, with no manual exports or screenshot-compiling. Reports can be customized per audience, so a DBA team, application owner, and leadership stakeholder each get the view that is actually relevant to them.
- Eliminate manual exports and screenshot-compiling from the monthly reporting routine
- Deliver the right report to the right audience automatically, customized per stakeholder
- Free up hours every month once configured — most teams who set this up see time savings within the first week
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Deploy Without Agents, Monitor Everywhere
No agents to install, patch, or babysit across your SQL Server estate
Category: Platform Architecture
Agent-based monitoring tools come with a hidden tax: an install project for every server, a patching and version-management burden that scales with your environment, and the resource overhead of running yet another process on production hardware. That tax gets paid again every time an agent needs an update or a new server joins the estate.
SQL Diagnostic Manager monitors agentlessly across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments, including virtual machines and Hyper-V, from a single installation. There is no separate agent-management project standing between a DBA and monitoring the next instance.
- Faster time-to-value — no agent install or rollout project standing between you and monitoring your first instance
- Lower ongoing overhead — no agent versions, patches, or health checks to manage across your estate
- Monitor on-premises, hybrid, and cloud SQL Server instances, VMs, and Hyper-V without deploying separate collectors everywhere
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Monitor Without Ingest Fees
Predictable, per-instance pricing that doesn’t punish deeper visibility
Category: Pricing & Data Ownership
Many observability platforms price on data ingest volume, which quietly turns deeper monitoring into a cost decision. Want to capture more granular telemetry or keep a longer retention window? On an ingest-based model, that curiosity comes with a bigger invoice — so teams under-monitor to control cost, exactly backwards from what they actually need.
SQL Diagnostic Manager is built around a customer-owned data repository and predictable, per-instance pricing, with no ingest-fee penalty for capturing more detail. The performance history stays in a repository the customer owns and controls, not a metered pipeline.
- Predictable per-instance pricing that doesn’t change based on how much telemetry you capture
- No penalty for turning on more detailed monitoring or extending your retention window
- Performance history stored in a repository you own and control, not a third-party metered pipeline
Available In: SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Get More on SQL Server Performance Monitoring
Common questions teams ask when evaluating a SQL Server monitoring tool.
What is SQL Server performance monitoring, and why does it matter?
SQL Server performance monitoring is the continuous process of tracking metrics like CPU, memory, I/O, TempDB usage, wait statistics, and query execution to understand how well a database is running — and to catch problems before they reach users. It combines real-time visibility with historical baselines, so DBAs can quickly tell normal fluctuation from a genuine issue like blocking, fragmentation, or resource contention. It matters because database problems rarely stay contained: a single slow query can cascade into a sluggish application, frustrated users, or a missed SLA. Without monitoring, DBAs are stuck reacting to help desk tickets instead of catching issues early. With it, predictive alerting and root-cause analysis let teams fix problems before they escalate — and at scale, where one team may manage hundreds of instances across on-premises, virtual, and cloud environments, that proactive visibility is what keeps performance and uptime predictable.
How is SQL Diagnostic Manager different from native SQL Server tools like DMVs and Extended Events?
DMVs and Extended Events are powerful, but they're raw data sources — you have to know which queries to run, correlate results manually, and build your own historical context to spot trends. SQL Diagnostic Manager takes that same underlying data and turns it into continuous, real-time monitoring with dashboards, predictive alerting, and prescriptive tuning guidance, so DBAs aren't writing custom scripts every time they need visibility. It also adds capabilities native tools don't provide out of the box: cross-instance dashboards for monitoring hundreds of servers at once, automatic baselining to distinguish normal behavior from anomalies, cross-tier visibility into OS, storage, and virtualization layers, and cloud cost observability. AI-powered features go further still, analyzing execution patterns across competing queries to recommend workload-aware index changes. In short, DMVs and Extended Events are the raw instrumentation; SQL Diagnostic Manager is the monitoring, alerting, and diagnostic layer built on top that makes that data actionable at scale.
Does SQL Diagnostic Manager require agents on every monitored server?
No — SQL Diagnostic Manager uses an agentless architecture, meaning it collects performance data without installing a dedicated monitoring agent on every SQL Server instance. This keeps deployment overhead minimal and simplifies rollout, which matters most in hybrid and cloud environments where installing and maintaining agents across dozens or hundreds of servers would otherwise add operational burden and security surface area. Instead, SQL Diagnostic Manager connects to monitored instances to gather query-level observability, wait stats, blocking and deadlock detection, and cross-tier data from the OS, storage, and virtualization layers, without a persistent footprint running on each target server. This approach also makes it easier to scale monitoring across large SQL Server estates, since adding a new instance doesn't mean provisioning and maintaining another agent. For DBAs weighing monitoring tools, agentless deployment is often a deciding factor: it reduces both the maintenance workload and the potential attack surface compared to agent-based alternatives, while still delivering full data collection.
How is SQL Diagnostic Manager priced compared to other SQL Server monitoring tools?
SQL Diagnostic Manager uses predictable, per-instance pricing with no ingest fees — a meaningful difference from tools that charge based on data volume, since ingest-based pricing can penalize verbose environments or scale unpredictably as monitoring granularity increases. This matters most for teams managing large or complex SQL Server estates: with per-instance pricing, adding monitoring depth or historical retention doesn't quietly drive up the bill the way it can with consumption-based models. It also makes budgeting more straightforward, since costs scale in line with the number of servers monitored rather than fluctuating with workload activity or query volume. Beyond licensing cost, total cost of ownership should factor in what's included at no extra charge — SQL Diagnostic Manager bundles capabilities like mirroring, replication, and TempDB monitoring that some competitors treat as paid add-ons. For DBAs comparing options, the practical question isn't just "what's the sticker price," but whether the pricing model stays predictable as your environment grows.
WHY SQL DIAGNOSTIC MANAGER
Monitor Smarter, Not Just Louder
Redgate SQL Monitor, SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer/SQL Sentry, and Quest Spotlight on SQL Server/Foglight all monitor SQL Server. Here is where SQL Diagnostic Manager is deliberately different.
SQL Server-specific Depth
Built for SQL Server first, not a broad multi-platform tool stretched thin across every database engine on the market
Transparent, explainable insights
Server-specific baselines and AI-driven recommendations a DBA can inspect and control, not a black-box model making silent decisions
Predictable cost, faster deployment
Per-instance pricing with no ingest fees, and agentless deployment across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments
RELATED PRODUCTS
Learn More About Our Popular Products
SQL Compliance Manager
SQL Secure
SQL Safe Backup
SQL Inventory Manager
SQL Admin Toolset
AI Free Tools