So, we're talking at cross purposes here.

Results to text put the results out as text in the results window. They don't go to any file anywhere. They're just text instead...

It's not about fragmentation. It's about the delta store, the place where the deletes are kept. You want to watch that and rebuild based on clearing that up, not fragmentation.

You may need to set up a linked server on the Azure VM. Use synonyms to dummy out the behavior.

Restores.

Restores matter more than backups. No one cares how good your backups are. They care whether or not you can restore the database. Learn to do restores in your sleep....

This seems a little harsh. I would assume there was more to the story. For example, this is the 14th time this person has opened an email and let loose...

And yet another week of dealing with the "anti-virus" virus...

Sheesh.  Not only did we have to deal with systems being sluggish this week still, we had to deal with...

Check your cost threshold for parallelism. 5 is the default and it's too low.

I'd still strongly recommend doing what I suggested with query store.

Thanks for coming back with what the problem was. So many people never let us know.

You can modify system_health to keep more data, but, from the sounds of it, I...

Yep.

Assuming you're on SP1, or greater, of SQL Server 2016, you can use DATABASE SCOPED CONFIGURATION to change the cardinality estimation engine. You should set LEGACY_CARDINALITY_ESTIMATION to ON.

Again, I...

We're on SQL Server 2016, yes?

Don't use Profiler and Trace Events. They are old school. Worse yet, filtering on them is horrible. Even though you apply a filter (only look...

I'm with everyone else, get back to the old cardinality estimation engine for a short time. Turn on Query Store on your database. Run your load for a bit to...

Sounds like blocking or resource contention. Take a look at the system_health Extended Event session. Excessive waits and blocks are automatically captured there. It should give you a lot more...

Monitoring Query Store through Extended Events is a good way to keep an eye on how it's behaving. For a whole bunch of info on Query Store, I'd like...

In this modern age, don't forget that you don't have to download and install SQL Server. You can pretty quickly spin up containers with SQL Server ready to play with....