Redgate recently released SQL Monitor 5.2, which is the latest upgrade to our monitoring/alerting/troubleshooting product for DBAs. This was the big change that the team has spent a lot of time developing and refining. It’s been available for a few weeks as a hidden URL, but with 5.2, this becomes the default main screen for SQL Monitor.

I think it’s a good move forward. In general, I don’t like things moving around physically in applications, as I get used to them being in a certain spot, or I expect them. However in this case, it makes sense.

In a dashboard for monitoring and alerting, you want to know what’s broken. Having a list of 20 servers at the top, and 1 broken one potentially “beneath the fold” (in newspaper parlance) and requiring scrolling would be bad. As a DBA, I’d want to see those items that are problematic. When I look at the monitor.red-gate.com site, I see:

The cluster has a long running query, which is an active, high priority alert. If I were to clear this, along with the other active alerts, this “card” would move to the end, and the sm-cluster2 item would take the top left spot.

Note there are options to configure what is a high or low priority, and even pin specific servers at the top, but the general behavior is to let you know what’s broken now.

There’s one other cool feature in this. If I have a high level alert, like a machine unreachable, and the alert clears itself (the machine reboots), I may see the machine as “green” on the dashboard when I login. This is because current alerts are shown, not historical ones. I can still get the historical data, but the intention is to make this a responsive tool for right now, not last night.

I think this is a great change, and I’m excited to see how well it works in practice as customers roll this out.

Filed under: Blog Tagged: Redgate, SQL Monitor, syndicated