One of my goals this year is to really spend some time learning more about Extended Events (XE). I'm somewhat embarassed that almost a decade after their introduction in SQL Server 2008, I have a fairly rudimentary grasp of the system. I've watched talks from Jonathan Kehayias and Erin Stellato and others. I recognize the value in a lightweight system, but for some reason I haven't done much with XE.

As part of my learning, I'm going back to the basics with videos, articles, and documentation. In one section, I ran across the templates and how they can be used to greatly simplify the creation of new sessions. I'm a bit fan of templates, and I love the ones I use for T-SQL in SQL Prompt. I know templates are incredibly useful in plenty of other areas.

XE is more complex system. The verbiage, the complexity of filtering, and the variety of targets make this a very flexible system, but also one that can overwhelm people. When do you use the histogram target v the ring buffer? What events make the most sense to solve or diagnose your system?

Today I wonder if some of you out there can share some knowledge. Are there built in templates that you find useful for certain situations? Have you created your own that speed up your analysis of an issue? If so, it would be great if you could share some code and explain why you find certain session settings useful. If you find some templates to be problematic, perhaps share that.

As I'm learning, I think that it's likely I'll have my own set of events and settings that I lean on heavily. Since I can save these on an instance, and not just a workstation, that's a huge improvement over trace. These sessions can be shared with other DBAs in my organization, which is helpful and handy. Maybe one of you will give me a new template that I can add to my toolbox.