In talking to a customer recently, they were worried about the amount of data kept by SQL Monitor. That’s a fair concern as monitoring a large number of servers can result in lots of data.

As an aside, data management is one of the reasons that I’d always want to buy a monitoring tool from a vendor. Most people don’t get this right and it’s a pain to deal with. I’d like you to look at SQL Monitor, but if it doesn’t work for you, look at our competitors. More people need monitoring on their systems.

In any case, this customer wanted to ensure some data was removed, but not other data. Their concern was that things like performance data or storage data might be needed for a long time while alert data or top queries might not. In other words, customized data management is needed.

I posted the suggestion in the SQL Monitor Slack channel, asking the developers if they were considering it. In about 5-10 minutes, I got this link: https://monitor.red-gate.com/Configuration/Purging

Shazam! They’d already done it.

Actually, they’ve released this to frequent updaters, but in an upcoming release, this will be the default. You’ll be able to customize how long you want to keep each kind of data. Not by machine (yet), but if you need that, let us know.

SQL Monitor continues to amaze me with their progress. If you want to get an idea of how it works, check out monitor.red-gate.com, our demo site, where we monitor some real servers at Redgate, including the SQLServerCentral database instances.

And if you want it in your enterprise, download a trial today.