Activity Monitor-ing

  • Can anyone explain why Microsoft consistently make the Activity Monitor in SQL Server (whichever version) so very, very bad? As a Production DBA, the SQL 2008 is next to useless. The SQL 2000 version used to drive me insane. The SQL 2005 version was far from perfect, but it was their best to date... so they ditched it and made something worse.

    I know I can use dmv's to retrieve the data I want, and I do this for specific investigations, but what I really want is a rapid, user friendly, dynamically updating snapshot of what's going as a generic starting point for my investigation.

    And can anyone recommend a better GUI based monitor, preferably a free one? I would like it to;

    - allow me to choose my own columns from those available in the dmv's.

    - remember what I choose

    - remember column widths

    In some magical dreamland I would also be able to;

    - define my own query to use including calculations, conditional formatting... sigh...

    - right/double click on a process and choose view it's query, locks, metrics...

    Surely, surely this is simple and obvious... the API is obviously there...

  • And can anyone recommend a better GUI based monitor, preferably a free one?

    Crickets......

  • Hi,

    You can make use of SSRS to develop custom reports.



    Praveen D'sa
    MCITP - Database Administrator 2008
    http://sqlerrors.wordpress.com

  • There's nothing free I know of that does all that. You can, as pointed out, query the DMVs to get what you're after. Tim Ford created a "Periodic Table of DMVs" that you may find helpful. It's at http://thesqlagentman.com/periodic-table/.

    If you want to buy a professional tool, I use SQL Sentry. It isn't free, but it covers a lot of territory.

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