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 global configuration and the "special" database's behabviour doesn't change.

EXAMPLE SOLUTIONS:
• Autoexpand the left-hand side navigation, draw attention to it
• Add Disks, Jobs and Databases as child-elements to the left-hand navigation
• show the configuration hierarchy when editing alert settings. Highlight levels where overrides exist. Allow to apply new configuration to multiple levels simultaneously

What do you think about these solutions? Got another idea? Let us know in the comments!

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 scale

What do you think about these solutions? Got another idea? Let us know in the comments!

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 already met.

EXAMPLE SOLUTIONS:
• Change the “Job duration unusual”
• New alert(s)

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.

This will help us with analysis immensely.

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 2005.