SQL Monitor raises alerts when it detects problems across your servers.

What alerts does SQL Monitor raise?

SQL Monitor alerts warn you about various issues on your host machines, SQL Server instances and databases. List of all alert types raised by SQL Monitor

You can customize individual alert types for specific jobs, disks, databases, servers, clusters and groups. See Configuring alerts.

If you create custom metrics to collect data specific to your environment, you can create alerts to warn you when the metric values pass certain thresholds. See Configuring custom metrics and alerts.

Event alerts and continuous alerts

The following types of alerts are Event alerts, which are raised for incidents that occur at a specific point in time:

• Availability group - failover
• Cluster failover
• Deadlock
• SQL Server error log entry

Event alerts are raised at a defined level (Low, Medium or High) which you can configure.

All other types of alert including custom alerts are Continuous alerts. Continuous alerts can have the following status:

• Active: the issue is still currently a problem
• Ended: the issue has been resolved

Depending on the type of alert, the Active duration of an alert can be quite short, for example less than a minute for long-running query alerts, or several days or even weeks for backup overdue alerts.

Like event alerts, continuous alerts are raised at a defined level (Low, Medium or High) which you can configure. For continuous alerts, however, you can configure multiple thresholds, so this level can automatically escalate or downgrade while the alert status is Active.

Alert times displayed in SQL Monitor

All alert times in SQL Monitor are displayed in the local time of your web browser, regardless of where the Base monitor server or your monitored servers are located. For example, if an alert is raised on a server in London at 18:00 and you are using SQL Monitor in New York, the alert time will be displayed as 13:00 (local time for New York).

Note: The web browser clock and Base Monitor clock need to be synchronized for SQL Monitor to work correctly.

Working with alerts

Viewing a list of raised alerts

The Alert Inbox page lists all the alerts that have been raised. You can filter the Inbox in many ways, to list only alerts that you are interested in.

Viewing the details of raised alerts

The Alert details page shows information about a single alert. Click on any alert in the Alert Inbox to view its details, and then use the Newer and Older buttons to view details of other alerts.

Changing alert settings

The Alert settings page allows you to disable an alert or change its level and thresholds.

Temporarily suspending alerts

The Configuration page allows you to schedule maintenance windows during which alerting is suspended on selected servers.

Creating custom alerts

The Create custom metric wizard allows you to create a metric and add a custom alert based on the collected metric values. See Creating custom metrics and alerts.