Change Tracking

Hello. In this video, we're going to have a quick look about how we can see the change tracking feature in Foglight. Let's first of all drill into one of these instances, and I'll show you how to see what's changed. So if, for example, you suddenly started to see some performance problems or you're asked to look at a particular instance to see if you can identify any issues, one of the things that's useful at this point is just to see what's changed. And we access that through the Advanced Analytics feature. What I suggest you do at this point is actually open up the time range to something a bit bigger so we can see what might have changed over say, the last seven days. And what you then see on the graph here is all the different points are things that have changed over the last seven days. And they're all categorized on the right hand side here. So we have things like account changes, database configuration changes, where objects have changed, for example-- new index, something like that, system configuration changes. The particular one that I wanted to draw your attention to is around execution plan changes. So here's a list of execution plan changes. You can see the points over time where the execution plans have changed. And as a user, you could search for, for example, a particular table for a particular query or something like that. Or you might just want to look at a particular change. Perhaps that corresponds to a performance impact, like if you saw something change on a particular day, and then you see that the same sort of correlation of time that there was a problem with a particular query at that time, you could highlight that particular change. Open up the plan analyzer feature, and then that will allow you to see the plan as we see on a particular day, like the 15th. But you can also then compare the plans. So maybe you could change plans here and look at the other one. But what's useful here is to see that this is the plan we have on the 15th of June. But previously, the plan appeared on the right hand side on the 7th of May when we had that particular plan. So that would help you see operator changes, or if it had gone from a index scan to a table scan, or a different type of operator that might be more expensive. We can see those particular changes there. And what's useful for you to know is if you wanted to optimize that SQL, this is the plan that perhaps was more efficient. Because we could go back, identify that query, and track its performance over time. OK, so that's how we look at plan changes and change tracking. But as I said, you can also look at configuration changes. And then you can highlight a particular change, like if we added more memory or something like that. Or if we look at the database objects, for example, we can see where a particular object has been created and see what the date and time is for that. And that's the change tracking feature. Thank you for listening.