SQL Monitor is a web-based monitoring and alerting tool for SQL Servers. It displays real-time data about the performance of all host machines, SQL Server instances, and databases that you choose to monitor, and raises alerts when problems occur.

You can use SQL Monitor to:

• identify servers that require attention using the Global Overview
• drill down to view the health and performance of any server or database
• use performance diagnostics to analyze waits and expensive queries.
• view detailed alerts for issues including job failures, deadlocks, overdue backups and fragmented indexes
• configure each type of alert for each server, job, database etc to suit your environment, and set up email notifications
• analyze performance metrics to determine performance trends and identify abnormal performance
• compare metric data with a baseline to see patterns of common or unusual behavior
• create custom metrics and alerts to collect the metric data you're interested in and get alerts about changes specific to your environment
• automatically install custom metrics and alerts from Red Gate's online resource for SQL Monitor metrics
• "rewind time" to review the activity on your servers when a problem occurred in the past
• run your own reports against the Data Repository SQL Server database that contains monitored data

What's new in version 4.0

Version 4.0 includes support for performance diagnostics, so you can analyze the longest waits and most expensive queries affecting SQL Server. See Using performance diagnostics.

For more details, see SQL Monitor 4.0 release notes.

Worked examples

• Using SQL Monitor for the first time
• Example configuration using virtualization software