Hi there,

Great article! We do something similar here, but with a push method as we have a lot of overseas servers etc. We also use the DBCC SQLPERF(LOGSPACE) command to populate the remote repository using DTS package data pump task with the command as the source. The downside is obviously this has to reside on each server... But I like Noel's one, that's me sorted for the rest of the day!

We did try Spotlight on SQL Servers Enterprise, and to be honest it didn't really do the trick as a monitoring solution. It was very pretty indeed, but I found the alert side of things was lacking, so you needed to be sitting there looking at it. I should imagine it would be great for a diagnosis tool if a server starts playing up though!

On a side note, I have written a service which polls all our SQL servers on a sheduled basis for perfmon counter information and stores that info in the same repository leading to some great daily performance reports with day on day comparison so it's quite easy to see when a machine starts struggling and also if a certain time of day is particularly bad (i.e. a rough job that could do with streamlining). It's VB.NET, and it's bespoke to my company, but I'm sure it wouldn't take too much fiddling to get it going elsewhere.