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UI ideas for SQL Monitor
paul.price
Posts: 18 Bronze 2
In general I have always been very impressed with all of the RedGate tools. However, I'm just getting started with SQL Monitor and would like to suggest some improvements for the UI.
Alerts - add a "NEXT" button to go to the details of the next message (without having to go back to the index).
Alerts - "CLEAR & NEXT" to clear the current alert and go to the next one.
My general experience is that the UI performance/responsiveness is rather slow. The software is installed locally and it's still slow.
Alerts - multi-select with mouse drag from index for clearing
Alert check boxes - is a round trip really necessary to check a box? Probably not.
In order to be useful to me, I should be able to check all of my databases in about 2-3 minutes per day. If it takes 30 minutes or more, I will either not check them or I'll look for another tool.
I'd be happy to discuss any of these in greater detail.
Alerts - add a "NEXT" button to go to the details of the next message (without having to go back to the index).
Alerts - "CLEAR & NEXT" to clear the current alert and go to the next one.
My general experience is that the UI performance/responsiveness is rather slow. The software is installed locally and it's still slow.
Alerts - multi-select with mouse drag from index for clearing
Alert check boxes - is a round trip really necessary to check a box? Probably not.
In order to be useful to me, I should be able to check all of my databases in about 2-3 minutes per day. If it takes 30 minutes or more, I will either not check them or I'll look for another tool.
I'd be happy to discuss any of these in greater detail.
Comments
This is a popular request and we have an outstanding enhancement request to get this done (ref SRP-1953). I've added your comments to this.
We already support Ctrl-Click and Shift-Click for multi-select of alerts. Do you feel that using mouse drag is a big improvement over both of these?
I presume that you are referring to the alert check boxes on the Alert Inbox? (as opposed to the Configuration > Alert Settings page). I don't think that we're making any round trips on clicking one of these boxes. Could you explain this one in a bit more detail?
We are putting performance improvements into the product with each release. v2.3 (out in May potentially) will have more efficient task scheduling as well as several UI performance improvements.
Are there any pages that you are finding particularly slow? Also how many servers are you monitoring?
The base monitoring service's CPU usage increases linearly with each monitored server and it's possible that this could be using up CPU resource on that machine. A distributed setup with the base monitor on a dedicated machine is more performant.
Note that another big performance gain is to use a browser other than IE. This can make a huge difference in many cases.
Hope this helps
Chris
Test Engineer
Red Gate
Correct. Checkboxes are on Alert Inbox. I was just assuming that it was a round trip because of the time it took to paint the checkbox and highlight the row.
Correct about IE as well. I can try Firefox, but am stuck with IE as my default browser (controled by someone else).
There are only 3 SQL instances on one big server that are being monitored. My system is a dual-core machine. Watching Task Manager, one core alternates between 10 and 85% CPU on a 30 second recurring rate. The second core has a similar pattern (30 seconds) but is between 5 and 25%. Half of my 3G memory is available. All SQL instances (monitored and local) are 2008R2.
-Paul[/quote]
We haven't got any publishable browser performance comparisons but we test on (and support) IE7, IE8, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. The general consensus is that all non-IE browsers are considerably faster, but initial testing on the IE9 release candidate suggest that it has closed the gap with its competitors.
We are adding support for IE9 (released this month I hope) and Firefox 4 in SQL Monitor v2.3.
Regards
Chris
Test Engineer
Red Gate