Foglight for SQL Server Overview

Hello. My name is Pini Dibask, and I'm a Product Manager for Database Performance Monitoring with Quest. In today's video, we'll review Foglight for SQL Server and show you how it is best suited to monitor your SQL Server instances. Foglight for SQL Server is a 24x7 enterprise monitoring solution which allows you to effectively monitor your databases, featuring deep resource monitoring capabilities with powerful analysis toolset to enable fast problem resolution and proactively fix issues before they become a real problem. This solution also provides a rich set out-of-the-box in-context and enterprise reports. With a low overhead agentless architecture, Foglight for SQL Server monitors your SQL Server environments for both physical and virtual deployments. This solution supports all SQL Server editions and configurations, including on-premise as well as cloud deployments. Let's start with the monitoring aspect of the product. Foglight for SQL Server is part of Foglight for Databases' heterogeneous solution, which allows you to monitor your entire environment across domains from a single view. This solution supports monitoring traditional relational databases-- such as Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, SAP ASE-- open source relational databases-- such as Postgres, MySQL-- and also NoSQL databases-- such as the MongoDB and Cassandra. It also supports databases which reside in the cloud so it can cover both on-premise and cloud deployments. Here, we can see the Foglight Global View, which is the first screen that you can see, once you log into the product. The Global View page provides high level monitoring information for your entire cross-platform database environment and can address specific common DBA questions such as, which instances have the highest workload? Which instances haven't been upgraded to the latest release? Which instances have been available for the longest duration? Foglight for Databases provides dozens of comprehensive out-of-the-box alarms, dashboards, and reports, which you could access directly from the Global View page. When analyzing a potential problem, it is crucial to understand whether the observed behavior is normal for that environment. Foglight for SQL Server's smart baseline algorithm understands your environmental profile and maps the expected behavior in different time periods-- hour in a day, day in a week, week in a month, and so on. In this example, you can see whether your host resources utilization is within the expected baseline range or deviated from the baseline. This allows you to spot rule changes in the normal activity and avoid wasting time in looking for the problems. Additionally, you can easily understand whether your instance workload is within the expected profile. Foglight for SQL Server has rich monitoring coverage, covering high availability architectures and disaster recovery solutions, monitoring different storage aspects, up to date with the recent technologies including SQL Server-only nooks, providing both real-time and historical views. The SQL Server Overview dashboard is the starting point for getting to the root cause of the issue, as it covers all aspects of the instance health at a glance, showing availability of the instance databases and underlying related services, status summary of high availability and disaster recovery solutions, highlight storage utilization metrics, uncovers any OS resource bottlenecks including virtualization issues, detecting operational failures including job failures and error log messages. It also provides performance insights into resource consumption, workflow trend, throughput and sessions activity. Here is an example of how the Overview dashboard clearly identifies storage issues, as 94% of the data space is already consumed. And also, data protection issues as five databases don't have any backups. In the right section of the Overview dashboard, you can view a list of alarms as well as top 10 SQL statements ordered by the active time. The blocking Lock dashboard allows to analyze the current lock trees and easily identify how many sessions are blocked, what is the leading blocking session, and which SQL statement is executed by that session. Foglight for SQL Server is also capable of showing detailed historical analysis for deadlock information in order to solve even the most complicated blocking lock situations. For example, you can analyze deadlock by applications. You can also examine the details of each session participating in the deadlock, and also view the entire deadlock graph. Lack of space where your critical file groups and logs reside could lead to stability issues and even downtime. The Databases dashboard allows you to quickly identify and respond to storage shortage situations as well as investigate user trends to better prepare for tomorrow's needs. The TempDB dashboards provide overall view of this critical database resource usage and, short-term, the time it takes to resolve space-related problems, showing detailed usage profile information over time, real-time and historical version store usage statistics, as well as current and historical sessions which consume TempDB resources. Memory has always been a critical key resource to instance performance. With SQL Server, in memory OTP feature, ensuring the memory is utilized properly is even more important. The Memory dashboard provides a wide overview of the memory usage and shows how stressed SQL Server is for memory utilization standpoint. In this case, SQL Server uses only 89% of the memory it needs, and there is a lot of available memory in the machines, so there is no memory pressure. We can further analyze the heavy memory consumers starting from the most utilized resource pool all the way to the object level in the Databases dashboard. In this case, we selected a specific database and we can see in the table below that this database has two tables. And for each one of those tables, we can see the number of rows, we can see the reserved memory size, as well as they used the memory size. Foglight for SQL Server also monitors your replication environments. A dedicated overview dashboard shows both the application environment topology and its status. Topology view includes a full list of servers and databases on both publisher and subscriber sites. Status indication clearly points to the areas that needs attention. So you can easily zoom in and analyze any problem that was