Suggestions
Welcome to the Redgate SQL Monitor feature suggestions list. Tell us how we can improve SQL Monitor by voting on these suggestions or by submitting your own ideas.
This is the easiest way to make an impact on SQL 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 — often the SQL Monitor team will initially stay quiet about new suggestions to see what you have to say!
If you have any questions visit the SQL Monitor forum.
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Make alert configuration levels more discoverable
CONTEXT: In SQL Monitor, you can configure alert behaviour down to the object level (such as the Database or the Job level). This is useful e.g. when we have specific databases with different backup policies to our global configuration, since we can specifiy "special rules" for individual databases.
PROBLEM: It is counterintuitive how to do so, and many people don't spot the left-hand drilldown navigation - this makes you think that you can only configure on the global and the server level! Also, when we have created an override, it's easy to forget so causes surprise when we change the…
167 votescurrently under investigation
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Install SQL Monitor without needing to provision a (large) SQL Server database
CONTEXT: One challenge with installing SQL Monitor is that we need to provide a connection to a SQL Server database.
PROBLEM: This can be costly or complicated. It would be better if SQL Monitor had an alternative backend.
EXAMPLE SOLUTIONS:
• Offer a hosted data store
• Automatically deploy a free backend alternative such as mongoDB or PostgreSQL
• Reduce data collection so that SQL Express can be used for small deployments
• Provide greater granularity over data retention policiesWhat do you think about these solutions? Got another idea? Let us know in the comments!
147 votes
Adam
responded
We’ve made some improvements in this area but will leave it open so you can continue to give us your suggestions
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Exclude queries from top 10 queries
I would like to be able to exclude specific queries from Top 10 Queries. We use SQLQueryNotificationService which means our top 10 queries based on duration are always showing these queries as they have a waitfor. I would like the ability to exclude items from the top 10 queries.
Typical query I would like to able to exclude:
WAITFOR(RECEIVE TOP (1) messagetypename, conversationhandle, cast(messagebody AS XML) as message_body from [SqlQueryNotificationService-07e6439b-8276-45aa-963f-bed011b3ef2f]), TIMEOUT @p2143 votes -
Deal better with extremely spikey data
CONTEXT: Some counters displayed by SQL Monitor is extremely spiky. SQL Monitor scales its graph such that the any spike fits on the y axis
PROBLEM: If there is one extreme spike, all the other data gets scaled such that it's very close to the x-axis, making any patterns in the data hard to see.
EXAMPLE SOLUTIONS:
• allow to manually zoom into the y axis
• allow extreme spikes to be beyod the drawing area of the graph (still with some indicator of how high the spike is)
• have an option to show the graph on a logarhithmic…117 votes -
Job duration taking too long - triggering WHILE job is still running
CONTEXT: If a job is taking a long time (outside of some predefined threshold), we want to be alerted about it. That’s often an actionable alert – we could decide to stop the job, we could let the users know that report XY will be late as a consequence etc. One step further is being alerted on the job STEP level as well.
PROBLEM: Current alert “Job duration unusual” is triggered AFTER the job completes, if it meets the alert's criteria. We need an alert to trigger WHILE the job (or job step) is still running, but the criteria is…
109 votes -
Suport for Azure SQL Hyperscale
Add support for the new Azure SQL Hyperscale PaaS solution
103 votes -
Monitor SQL instances running in AWS RDS
Enable SQL Monitor to add AWS RDS instances as monitored servers
101 votesSql Monitor 10.1.7 now offers the first iteration that monitors Amazon RDS Servers (as a preview feature). You can add an Amazon RDS SQL Server instance from the Monitored servers page within Configuration.
Please visit the SQL Monitor documentation site to learn more: https://documentation.red-gate.com/sm10/release-notes-and-other-versions/sql-monitor-10-1-release-notes
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Per database table fragmentation.....
I would like to see a a Sql Monitor "information" page that shows the "top 10" fragmented tables on a per database level.
94 votesGood idea! If this suggestion gets more traction, we’ll implement this.
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Use extended events instead of trace when trace initialized due to alert
I have seen a related idea https://sqlmonitor.uservoice.com/forums/91743-suggestions/suggestions/5717202-use-extended-events-for-deadlock-tracing-instead
However, I'm expanding this. If the SQL version is high enough the trace of current activity should be using extended events instead of a trace, this would reduce the total impact to the server performance while also expanding the available information.
86 votes
Daniel Rothig
responded
Thanks for the suggestion – we’ll monitor how popular it gets
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Do other tasks than send email on new alert
It would be nice if it was possible to allow other tasks when a alert is raised. Other tasks which could be called: Script file, url, exe file.
79 votesAdam
responded
We were initially a bit sceptical about this, reasoning that if your monitoring solution becomes an active part of the system, it’s no longer a monitoring solution but part of the infrastructure that needs to be monitored.
However, our thinking in this area has evolved and we can see there are a number of scenarios where it would be useful for alerts to trigger an additional action, and where potential risks are nevertheless manageable.
If you’d like to help us understand more about the kind of things this might help achieve, please email sqlmonitorfeedback@red-gate.com and we’ll get back to you.
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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.
65 votes -
Add additional perfmon counters
It would be useful to have configurable perfmon counters available in "Analysis" above and beyond the out-of-the-box counters.
62 votesDaniel Rothig
responded
For SQL Server perf counters, you can create a Custom Metric against sys.dm_os_performance_counters. For Machine perf counters, you have to use CLI at the moment
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61 votes
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Search through (closed) alerts for a string.
It would be great if we could search closed alerts for a string. For example I want to see all the alerts that have included a particular view in the query text.
(Also include comments in the search)
60 votesDaniel Rothig
responded
We’re looking into this – no ETA at the moment
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Jobs in calender formart so you can see when they are all schedualed.
It would be nice if you could see all jobs on the server. Perhaps in a calender format so that you can see when they are schedualed. It would be nice if you could drag and drop so that it changes start times. It would be nice if you could see the job history as well.
57 votesDaniel Rothig
responded
We like the idea – if this idea gains traction, we’ll look into implementing something like this
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Drop markers on the graphs and add annotations
While working on performance tweaks it is customary to consult the analysis reports on a regular basis to see if our changes moved the needle. More often than not the tweaks are released one small batch at a time and it'd be nice to drop markers and custom annotations directly on the charts. I'd like to use that feature to add short phrases describing what was changed that led to the improvement, or degradation for that matter, of performance.
This would be by server (cluster/node) and by metric with the same retention period as the base data for that chart.
…
56 votes -
upgrade without reentering credentials
When you run an upgrade, there should be an option that just uses the current service credentials (i.e. leaves everything as is) instead of having to re-enter them.
53 votes -
Save and Export/Import sql monitor settings
Setting up custom alerts and servers is quite a bit of work. For example some jobs are more important than others. A different set of people get notified for some jobs. I have setup custom alert settings on many of the jobs this way. recently I had to move monitoring host to a different server and replicating same settings took me a lot of time. hence need ability to be able to export settings from one server and import to another. May be this will work through the monitoring database but I had to change the database from 2008 to…
50 votes -
TempDB unexpected growth
I think it would be a good idea to have information about what caused random sudden growth in tempdb. I know we can see the DB size chart but theres no way to know what caused it.
Information that would be nice to be captured:
Table name
What query created table
What user created table49 votes -
Specify a "details" query for custom metric
When I define a custom metric it would be super-helpful to be able to see some details that gave rise to the metric value. For example, I have one for "count of failed SQL logins in the last 10 mins". But to find out which logins failed, I have to go run queries in SSMS.
I'd like to be able to define a "details" query on the custom metric, the results of which are captured at time of collection, and are then available from the alert.
48 votes
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