February 28, 2020 at 7:51 pm
Hi SSC,
I am looking for some cheap or free 3rd party tools that I can use to monitor my SQL Server. I need to monitor performance, logins, log file growth, etc. We have versions ranging from 2008 r2 - 2016. I know Red Gate is one of the best on the market, but from what I understand, the price-tag is very high.
Can you folks recommend some good tools? In my experience, SQL "out of the box" monitoring tools are very crude and scattered all over the place. Activity monitor is decent at best, DMV's take time to construct and are clunky, DDL triggers needs maintenance, and extended events are buggy at best.
I am looking for an all in one dashboard, if one is available.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. --Mike Tyson
February 29, 2020 at 8:10 pm
Thanks for posting your issue and hopefully someone will answer soon.
This is an automated bump to increase visibility of your question.
March 2, 2020 at 8:22 am
As always depends what you need, if your talking a large volume of servers, you could be eligible for volume discounts on the larger retailers like Red-Gate, Quest, Idera.
Quest have spotlight cloud, you can monitor 5 servers for free
The DBATools PowerShell module has SQLWatch, freeware, uses PowerBI front end.
Brent Ozar has his first responder kit
Glenn Berry has his DMV scripts
Your favourite search engine will yield many a result if the search term is correct.
Other than that it is usually roll your own, why yes XE was buggy back in the 2012 days, now it is great, Activity Monitor is crude, a quick search will show a number of reasons not to use it. DMV's are great, ok they have limitation like a reboot clears them, but if you capture them are a required frequency they are great, not clunky, I've never seen any issues with them especially saying nearly 100% of the above tools use them or the system tables. DDL triggers, why yeah don't put yourself through that headache if you don't need to, most can be done in XE or Audits.
There will be no one tool which will meet exactly what you need, find the one that fits best and use custom metrics to make it work as you need.
March 2, 2020 at 12:58 pm
We are using the same tool that StackExchange, StackOverflow uses, it supports a really wide range of applications to monitor but we are using it for SQL Server, it's open source, you'll have to modify it to fit your needs.
StackExchange uses SQL Server single instances and Always ON, the tool supports both, it uses Brent Ozar, Adam Machanic scripts and the guys from Sentry One have helped.
It won't spoon feed you, it'll tell you how SQL Server is using and distributing memory, backups, instance configuration settings, it won't tell you that a query is using too much memory or reading too much pages, or i/o is slow. just an overview of the instance.
https://github.com/opserver/Opserver
I have found it to be quite helpful, you can't compare it to Redgate tools but we dont have the $$.
Regards,
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