Introduction:
This white paper is a guide for DBAs about determining the proper thresholds for monitoring a SQL Server environment.
Monitoring SQL Server is a critical component of a Database Administrator’s, or DBA’s, job. The bigger the environment is, the more important monitoring becomes. Enterprise environments typically have a high ratio of servers to DBAs and no DBA can keep watch of every aspect of the environment on their own. A very important aspect of monitoring is alerting.
Monitoring alone isn’t enough. When certain resource metrics or counters are reached, the DBA needs to be alerted and, in some cases, immediately notified that the threshold has been reached. Alerts can be delivered in a variety of ways and should not be confused with notifications. Alerts can be written to a log, raised in an application interface, or sent to another system for processing. A notification is a response to an alert that informs a person, or a group of people, that a specific alert has been raised.