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SQL Sentry: Overhead Analysis
Two of the most common questions we get about our software are "how much overhead will this cause on the monitored instance?" and "what kind of server(s) will we need for the monitoring components?" The only way to get the absolute truth about impact is to test it for yourself, in your own environment, using your hardware, data, network, usage patterns, etc. However, we realize that customers may not have an environment yet, or may not have a suitable replica of their production environment. To help answer these questions, this paper sets out to show, in our simulated environment, roughly how much additional load is placed on a single monitored server, and the total load placed on the monitoring servers when they are watching 1, 10, 25, 50 and 100 SQL Server instances. |
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Monitoring Disk Contention
Unusually heavy contention for disk resources can dramatically impact SQL Server performance. SQL Sentry Event Manager makes it a simple matter to see exactly what role jobs are playing in this issue. Many types of jobs are some of the biggest offenders since they incur disk IO's outside of the SQL Server process space, meaning SQL Server isn't in direct control of prioritizing all of the reads and writes. |
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Global Event Actions
Wouldn't it be comforting to know that every new scheduled job receives a baseline set of alert conditions? SQL Sentry Event Manager has many more notification conditions and resulting actions than those available with SQL Agent, and setting them at the global level can be the most powerful and efficient method to implement them. |
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Eliminating Backup Contention
Are your nightly backup jobs contending for SAN and network resources, causing I/O performance problems or errors? Would you like to see a calendar with all backup jobs across your enterprise that write to a SAN in one view, and eliminate any contention with just a few clicks? |
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Log Shipping and Replication
SQL Sentry Event Manager can be a valuable tool to help you monitor and manage log shipping and replication across your enterprise. By offering a customizable, visual, Outlook style calendar, DBAs can gain a true vision of the activity across all their servers in one view. |
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Job Queuing
SQL Sentry Event Manager can delay the start of a job until another job completes. For example, an optimization job is scheduled at 2:00 am and a backup job at 2:30 am. Sometimes the optimization job can take up to 45 minutes, causing contention with the backup job and performance problems on the server. |
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Job Automation
Job Automation through scripts can be troublesome to manage, particularly when automation activity across multiple servers. SQL Sentry Event Manager provides simple and easy methods for handling job monitoring and automation via visual job scheduling, robust alerting and response, and job chaining. |
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Management of SQL Server Virtualization
Virtualization is becoming the popular practice in many environments, allowing organizations of all sizes to utilize resources more efficiently. SQL Sentry Event Manager allows DBA's to more effectively manage these dynamic environments to ensure optimal performance. |
