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Did you know about Spotlight Freemium?

SQL Server DBA Professionals

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At PASS in Charlotte this year, we released Spotlight Freemium Monitoring in the form of a SQL Server Management Studio plug-in. We are working on expanding this functionality to make it a more useful tool so I thought I’d spend some time filling you in on what we are planning for early next year. Bear in mind that this is all still under development right now so things may change before we ship – safe harbour and all that.

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Tales from the Engine Room….

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What are we working on?

More Flexible Deployment Options Allow you, the SQL DBA, to install the Diagnostic Server (the service that runs in the background and collects data, evaluates rules and fires alarms) on a different machine to where your management studio plug-in is installed. The practical upshot of this is that if you have multiple DBAs, you can all look at the same data and you only need to collect it once.

Toolbar Let’s face it, you’re a busy DBA and have better things to do that stare at Spotlight all day. There will be a Spotlight toolbar that will allow you to see the high level status of your environment at a glance while you are busy doing other things – a single click will take you to the Heat Map or the Alarm List.

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Real Time Performance Health

SpotlightEssentials.com provides users with a daily score for performance health today. We have decided that it would be a good idea to provide this feature in real-time.

This feature will be in Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise as well. The plug-in will provide basic summary data – if you want the full resolution path, you’ll have to upgrade to Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise.

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Improved Summary Page

An improved layout of the summary page with some extra useful bits of data – including the aforementioned Performance Health score.

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Processes Drilldown

First thing you want to know when you look at a SQL Server is who is doing what – enter the Processes drilldown. You can filter to just see active processes, sort by any column (and we’ll remember the sorted column for next time). Also, you have the option to kill the selected process and if you want to see the SQL or the plan we can open it up for you with a single click right in Management Studio.

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Waits Drilldown

The Waits drilldown helps you to see where your SQL Server instances are spending time waiting.

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File I/O Drilldown

The File I/O Drilldown shows you what is going on with your data files. You can see a list of all the data files on your SQL Server instance. This drilldown effectively takes data, calculates rates on selected columns and allows you to easily see the level of activity at a file level.

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Top SQL Drilldown

The Top SQL drilldown allows you to see the top 25 SQL statements in the plan cache by average CPU per execution. Similar to the processes drilldown, if you want to see the SQL or the plan we can open it up for you with a single click right in Management Studio.

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This is exciting! So far so good…when and where can I get Spotlight Freemium?

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We are working as fast as we can to finish these features and make sure that it is solid, doesn’t use large amounts of resources and doesn’t crash SQL Server Management Studio. You can find the latest version of Spotlight freemium

Spotlight Freemium…what’s next?

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