SQL Monitor is a SQL Server monitoring and alerting tool, designed to help DBA teams proactively manage any number of SQL Server instances, whether they are hosted on bare-metal servers, on Virtual Machines, or in the cloud.

A Base Monitor service continuously monitors the availability, health and performance of all of these SQL Server instances, collecting and assessing a range of machine-, SQL Server- and database-level metrics, and associated alert data, storing it in a SQL Server database, and then presenting it in a single graphical web interface for review and analysis. SQL Monitor doesn't require installation of an agent on any of the SQL Server machines. Instead, SQL Monitor uses only industry standards, WMI and TDS, to collect monitoring data from remote computers.

SQL Monitor watches the whole SQL Server estate and raises alerts that warn the DBA of actual or impending problems. It speeds up diagnosis of alerts by summarizing the symptoms of the problem, alongside the SQL text, execution plans and performance statistics for server and user processes running around that time.

By collecting and analyzing metrics over time, SQL Monitor makes it easier to spot and fix concerns before they become a problem that impacts the running of the database. It reveals disconcerting trends, such as rapid database growth, on each SQL Server instance, and uses baselines to compare the current server behavior to historical behavior over similar periods, to help us understand when performance patterns are abnormal, and why.

By almost eliminating the need for routine manual checks on each database service, it enables better quality of service, without the need for ad hoc scripting.