In this video, I will be discussing IDERA’s SQL Server performance availability and diagnostic tool named SQL Diagnostic Manager. In the remainder of this video, I reference SQL Diagnostic Manager as SQL DM. As a modern tool, SQL DM gathers performance-related metrics from the monitored SQL Server instances and stores that data in its own repository database. Given that the data is stored in the database, SQL DM can generate reports to provide insights on your SQL Server environment. SQL DM has a number of built-in reports that will allow you to review the data that has been gathered by the tool. These reports can be leveraged to analyze trends, identify problematic queries, forecasts database growth, and so on. At this point, why do we not take a look at the SQL DM desktop client itself?

Currently, we are looking at the SQL DM desktop client which is the Windows graphical user interface for the tool. I am on the active alerts view. On this view, I can kind of get a higher-level overview of the health of my environment. In this video, however, I do not want to really talk about active alerts. Instead, what I want to focus on are reports.

So at the bottom left of the console, you will notice there is a button for reports. When you click on it, and you will get to the getting started page. On the Getting Started page, you will find a list of the various reports that are available within SQL Diagnostic Manager. These reports are grouped by the category in which each report will fit into. In addition, you will also find a short description of each report, which is helpful for new users. For example, the enterprise summary report can be used to view that overall health of your SQL Server environment. This includes all of the SQL Server instances that are being monitored by SQL Diagnostic Manager. The server summary report, on the other hand, can be used to view the health of a single SQL Server instance. Let us take a quick look at the server summary report.

When the report loads notice that you will find another description of the report being displayed. Instructions for the report is also provided down below. For this report, I simply need to specify an instance name and the start time. Upon running the report, I can see a high-level view of the health of the SQL Server instance along with the various graphs. Another detail I like to point out is that these reports can be exported to an Excel or PDF file, in cases you may want to review this information later. Another important detail is that these reports can be deployed to SQL Server reporting services. In doing so, you can leverage subscriptions with SSRS allowing these reports to be generated automatically.

On the left-hand side here you will notice this schedule email link. Upon clicking the link, you will access the reports deployment wizard, which can be then be used to obviously deploy this to SSRS. The wizard will walk you through all the necessary information that is needed. For example, here we are going to specify who the email is going to be sent to, in addition, the subject of the email, as well as the time that the email would be sent. On the next page, you will define your SQL Server reporting services, as well as authentication for the data source when configured in SQL Server reporting services. And lastly it will give you a quick summary of the deployment options, and when you pick click finish SQL Diagnostic Manager will go ahead and deploy the report to SSRS.

In this case, I am just going to go ahead and cancel out of this wizard, as I already have my reports deployed. Let us head back to the getting started page. As you can see, there is a number of reports are available. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to demonstrate each individual report. As such, I would recommend that you explore each report for yourself to see if it provides any information that is useful for you. If the built-in reports in SQL Diagnostic Manager are not giving you the information that you are looking for, SQL DM does provide you with the ability to create your own custom report. On the left-hand side here simply click on custom which will exposed the custom report options. Click on new to start the add custom wizard report, and it will simply ask for a name, as well as some counters that you want to include your report. You have a number of calendars to choose from including operating system calendars, SQL Server calendars, virtualization calendars, or even custom calendars that you may have created within SQL Diagnostic Manager already. For this example, I am just going to choose a handful of operating system counters just to kind of demonstrate what one of these custom reports may look like.

First, and notice that after clicking finish, it takes me directly to the custom report. In this particular report, I simply need to specify specific SQL Server instance in a time period for which I should include in the report. When I run the report, you will see the various graphs that are created, and you just go down for long enough, you will see the various grid-related data.

I hope this video has been helpful and getting you more familiar with reports within SQL Diagnostic Manager. If you would like to learn more about SQL Diagnostic Manager, please do visit our website. Thank you.