Suggestions
Welcome to the Redgate Monitor feature suggestions list. Tell us how we can improve Redgate Monitor by voting on these suggestions or by submitting your own ideas.
This is the easiest way to make an impact on Redgate Monitor’s roadmap. Check out the completed suggestions to see how your ideas have influenced us in the past. Please note that this list is one of multiple sources that drive our development, meaning that we will not always implement the highest-ranking suggestions.
To give your idea the greatest possible impact, please follow these guidelines:
- Describe the goal you’re trying to accomplish, rather than a specific solution to get there
- If you have a favoured solution, add it as a comment to your suggestion
- Give us as much context as possible
- Only make one suggestion per post. If you have multiple ideas, submit them in separate posts
- Comment and vote on existing posts to develop the ideas — the Redgate Monitor team will often stay quiet initially about new suggestions to see what you have to say!
If you have any questions visit the Redgate Monitor forum.
791 results found
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Quick view of whether Agent is up on all monitored servers
If I go to the Configuration > Monitored servers tab, I can quickly see if all SQL Servers are up and running. It would be nice to also be able to quickly see if all SQL Server Agent services are up and running.
3 votes -
Allow trace to be set at the individual alert level and severity
SQL Trace can highly impact the performance of the server. I can't benefit from trace right now as it's set on any alert to launch a trace.
Other monitoring tools, for instance Sql Sentry, allow the individual alert to be configured with settings for trace.
For example: A long running job might benefit from a trace, while a "dbcc checkdb " hasn't been run in a long time should not trigger a trace. This increases storage and server load for no benefit.
Please look into allowing traces to be configured based on the alert AND the severity level defined on…
6 votes -
Control Alerts Using Metadata
CONTEXT: We have a maintenance and backup solution which uses SQL Server as a backend to determine what databases to perform the tasks against, and at what time.
PROBLEM: Some databases do not have maintenance tasks running against them, but still have alerts which appear in SQL Monitor for them (e.g. Index Fragmentation). I don't want to manually exclude these from SQL Monitor, as the number of databases fluctuates, particularly on our testing and development environments.
EXAMPLE SOLUTIONS:
- Provide a means of easily enabling/disabling/changing alerts dynamically using a stored procedure.1 vote
Daniel Rothig
responded
For your usecase I recommend modifying the maintenance window metadata instead:
UPDATE s SET MW_IsEnabled = 1, —or 0 to enable alerts again MW_Start=0, —midnight MW_Duration=864000000000, —24 hours MW_Monday = 1, MW_Tuesday =1, MW_Wednesday=1, MW_Thursday=1, MW_Friday=1, MW_Saturday=1, MW_Sunday=1 FROM [settings].[SqlServers] s INNER JOIN [settings].[Clusters] c ON c.Id = s.ParentId WHERE c.Name = ‘hostname’ AND s.Name = ’’ —Set to SQL Server name or leave empty for unnamed instancesA restart of the base monitor service will be required after the change
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Alert based upon trend data
We want to be able to alert when a value changes dramatically over a period of time. so if a system returns 110,105,112,40,38,52
to eye ball that on a graph I can see there is a problem, however that may be at the peak time of the day and 38 might be a reasonable value for in the middle of the night, so having a threshold of a low value is not appropriate, the comparison mode of query for this situation would report a change of
-5,+7,-72,-2,+14in here there is one large drop but then it is running stable,…
3 votes -
Add alerting for replication performance
Include an alert to monitor replication performance. i.e based on the latency reading that you can view in Replication Monitor. The counters for this are "SQL Server Replication LogReader: Delivery Latency" and "SQL Server Replication Dist.: Delivery Latency". I'd like to be able to set the alert priority based on this.
82 votesThanks for the votes and comments on this one. We're actively considering adding replication latency monitoring and alerting to Redgate Monitor.
Since this suggestion was raised, we've added a replication page under Estate tab that lists replication agent jobs with their publisher, distributor, subscriber, publication and job status. It doesn't yet show latency or let you alert on it, but it is something we are considering.
Latency is one of several pieces of replication information customers have asked us for and so it woudl be good to know which of these matter to you:
- Publisher to distributor latency (Log Reader agent delivery latency)
- Distributor to subscriber latency (Distribution agent delivery latency)
- Number of undistributed commands waiting to be applied to each subscriber
- The most recent replication error text for an agent
- + Alerts on any of the above
Please add a comment saying which of these you'd use!
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In the Analysis tab, it would be better to have an option to change the font from grey (very hard to see) to black/dark blue or something
In the Analysis tab, it would be better to have an option to change the font from grey (very hard to see) to black/dark blue or something
6 votes -
comment markdown
CONTEXT: I use comments on alerts raised by SQL Monitor to document root cause of the triggered condition and resolution action.
PROBLEM: Comments only support plain-text. When creating/reviewing comments, it's often useful to add links for more detailed descriptions of the cause of the alerts, and links to ticketing systems for resolution steps. Simplified bulleting/numbering and bold/italicized text would also be helpful for breaking up monotonous text.
EXAMPLE SOLUTIONS: Add Markdown (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) support to addition/review of comments. A couple implementations for examples of usage:
- StackOverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/editing-help)
- GitHub (https://help.github.com/articles/github-flavored-markdown/)
4 votes -
Analysis parsing of dates and multiple baselines using a text input search
Allow the analysis and other date filters to provide the option to paste and try parsing the date based on matching common patterns (maybe even allowing user to define options in config file).
For example, the standard SQL datetime2(0) of yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss pasted would convert to the date it parses.
Maybe even consider taking a page from the freaking great design Simple Bank has started applying which is a text based filter applying friendly syntax. I have found this incredibly useful.
They let you type in the search filter
"last 3 months"
"last week"
"date:1/1/2015-1/15/2015"
"date:1/1/15-1/15/15"and it immediate updates…
3 votes -
Alert on long I/O operation
Hosting Company raised an alert that there is absolutely no trace of as an issue according to SQL Monitor:
ALERT NAME: Rackspace - SQL I/O Error
TIME: 6/22/2011 7:02:21 PM
REASON:
Event Description: SQL Server has encountered 174 occurrence(s) of I/O requests taking longer than 15 seconds to complete on file [M:\xcp_trans.mdf] in database [xcp_trans] (5). The OS file handle is 0x0000000000000BBC. The offset of the latest long I/O is: 0x000023b6d20000
SEVERITY: CRITICALPlease augment SQL Monitor to do the equivalent alerting.
33 votesDaniel Rothig
responded
Custom metrics on sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats are the best way to get this today
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Configurable time for fragmented indexes alert run
I would like an GUI option to configure the time the alert fragmented indexes run instead of it being set at 1.00am Sunday morning
27 votesDaniel Rothig
responded
Note that this can set in the BaseMonitor .config file
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Activity monitoring for DDL & DML
Add an element that will track all DML/DDL activity within a SQL Server instance and log this to a tamper proof archive. If linked to performance trends this can corrolate performance to T-SQL executed against the instance.
This has scope for aiding with Compliance with PCI-DSS & SoX.
13 votes -
Allow Fractional Alert Thresholds.
When you use the "Calculated rate of change" functionality on a custom metric, the results come back in fractional values and you should be able to alert on these values. In my case, I want to monitor number of orders for the last 10 minutes. There are always relatively few orders at night and many during the day, but if order flow drops off drastically in a short period of time, I want to know about it.
Unfortunately, I can't just alert when the rate of change drops by 25% (-.25) because alerts can only happen on integer values. 100%…
4 votesDaniel Rothig
responded
A current workaround is to multiply the result by a factor, eg. 100 to make the result a percentage.
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Option to filter(replace) sensitive SQL from alerts displayed/recorded
Similar regex functionality to how processes/queries can be excluded from an alert but to hide or better yet not record sensitive SQL/SQL fragments
10 votesDaniel Rothig
responded
Good idea – thanks!
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Ability to change the width of list of metrics at analysis page
The small width of list of metrics makes difficult to read list of metric if it has metrics with names over 20 chars. See attached screenshot.
6 votes -
Add day name(sat, sun, mo etc) of date to analysis screen
Add the day name of date to analysis screen.
Currently only the date and time is displayed on the graph lines dots.
6 votes -
Add plus/minus tolernaces for unusual job durations
Allow different tolerances to the plus and minus percentages for the "Job Duration Unusual". In some circumstances (especially when there may be a lot of data coming in and the disks are extremely busy), I don't mind a deviation of a few hundred percent positive in the deviation. But a negative deviation of 90% would likely indicate some of the expected data was missing (thus a problem).
1 vote -
Allow email configuration at the time you configure a new alert.
Once you configure an alert, it automatically defaults to notify the default recipient. However, if I want another user to receive these emails, I have to configure this through Alert Settings. I'd like the ability to set up the email address in Custom Metrics setting, so that everything is done in one integrated place.
3 votes -
Monitor an application server
You can already monitor a 'host' machine which does not host any SQL Server instances, but it would be nice if we could also monitor application log locations, services etc.
Maybe Custom Metrics which can use something other than t-sql?
3 votes -
MS DTC down alert....
I would like to see an Alert if MS DTC (the DTC service) has stopped\failed or doesn't restart after a reboot.
1 vote -
Make software FIPS 140-2 compliant
Currently SQL Monitor is not FIPS 140-2 compliant
5 votes
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