Real-time activity

tvandurmetvandurme Posts: 11 Bronze 1
in Redgate Monitor
This is probably a stupid question but where do I view real-time activity?
I want to see sessions that are currently active. When drilling down to the SQL USER PROCESSES it only displays the top 10 by CPU for a specific time frame. That view may include sessions that are no longer active at present. I want to see what is going on in real-time...

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  • GrantGrant Posts: 89 Silver 5
    Answer ✓
    So the top 10 is always just a snapshot. We don't continually poll the server in such a way that you can see queries scrolling by on your screen. You can update the snapshot just by clicking the button up on the timeline that will move everything to the latest data.
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  • tvandurmetvandurme Posts: 11 Bronze 1
    Grant wrote: »
    So the top 10 is always just a snapshot. We don't continually poll the server in such a way that you can see queries scrolling by on your screen. You can update the snapshot just by clicking the button up on the timeline that will move everything to the latest data.

    Ok, thanks Grant. The reason I asked... We have both SQL Monitor and Spotlight running and was comparing them when I came to this conclusion. Personally I think a troubleshooting tool should be able to show what is going on in real-time as well as historically. Say for instance a blocking issue is causing issues, Spotlight allows me to see what is going on in real-time and even allows me to kill a specific session. It also allows me to see details about past blocking issues. SQL Monitor only allows the latter...
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  • GrantGrant Posts: 89 Silver 5
    We show it in near real time. It's only delayed by a few seconds, but, it radically reduces what happens on your server. People can absolutely disagree on whether it's the right approach.

    I'd be VERY cautious of Spotlight. Of all the other vendor products out there, it's the single one I've had the most issues with. Do you know that it masks it's own calls to the server? If you really want to evaluate us against another software, pursue another vendor. I think we're better (I do have a prejudice), but the others are much safer than Spotlight.
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  • tvandurmetvandurme Posts: 11 Bronze 1
    Actually, we evaluated SQL Monitor already and purchased 35 or so licenses :) It was just something that caught my eye just now...
    Btw, I know Spotlight offers the ability to exclude its sessions from wait events and workload analysis. I don't know if you were referring to that when you say it masks its calls?
    Anyway, both have their pros and cons.
    Thanks for the quick replies!
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  • GrantGrant Posts: 89 Silver 5
    Yay!

    Spotlight hides it's own activities from the monitoring results. It's kind of odd. I've never seen a monitoring tool do that before.
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  • tvandurmetvandurme Posts: 11 Bronze 1
    I agree. It shouldn't...
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  • tobintobin Posts: 8 New member
    Grant wrote: »
    We show it in near real time. It's only delayed by a few seconds, but, it radically reduces what happens on your server. People can absolutely disagree on whether it's the right approach.

    I'd be VERY cautious of Spotlight. Of all the other vendor products out there, it's the single one I've had the most issues with. Do you know that it masks it's own calls to the server? If you really want to evaluate us against another software, pursue another vendor. I think we're better (I do have a prejudice), but the others are much safer than Spotlight.

    Hey Grant,

    I'm trying to show the benefits of SQL Monitor, and the guys can easily see the benefits from longtime trends, but they have a real love of Spotlight for fire-fighting. It does provide a great realtime view that allows them to see current sessions, current query times, and all queries - not just top 10.

    It's handy to be able to drill in and see all blocked processes, all deadlock victims, live as things are happening.

    Is there a good way to see this data in SQL Monitor?

    The team here has been focused on fighting fires for a long time - and while I'd rather get us past that, this is just their fact of life - response to emergency has to be instant, and while I can run sp_whoisactive, they're used to digging straight into Spotlight and seeing a "Current state". Having a single page where we could see the current CPU, Network Speed, metrics, what's running currently process, queries, sessions - even if it's just the latest state values from the last 30-second refresh, would be brilliant for them. Is that feasible, on the roadmap, or not an option?
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  • GrantGrant Posts: 89 Silver 5
    edited February 8, 2018 11:51PM
    Yeah, SQL Monitor shows near real time blocked processes, top waits, top queries, deadlocks. All that stuff. It's all right there when you open up the tool. Heck, if there's a blocked process, by default, you get alerted. You don't have to go and track it down. Further, clicking on the alert takes you to the blocked process report. By near, I don't mean hours or minutes. It's less than seconds.

    I do love sp_whoisactive too. It just doesn't supply trending, reports, etc. I can't knock it otherwise.

    The real issue for me with Spotlight (and I do recognize, I'm talking about a competition product, so please, take anything I say with some suspicion. That's fair.), is two-fold. One, it blocks it's own processes from any kind of reporting. You can't see it, even if it's the only thing running on the server. Two, it's pretty fat. That load you can't see, it's fairly heavy. I honestly can't say the same thing about the other competing products if that helps at all.
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  • tobintobin Posts: 8 New member
    To be honest, the only thing I would love on that dashboard view is some workload metric that would make sense - batches/s or similar... if my server is working hard, I want to know it's working on something. IE if my CPU or Disk IO or Wait spike, then is there a similar spike in activity that would justify it. But that's just me being me :) I'd probably end up digging in regardless.

    Thanks for getting back to me.
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  • Adam WAdam W Posts: 111 Silver 3
    Hi Tobin,

    Getting better at showing real-time activity is something the development team is looking into right now. We'd like to understand a bit more about some of the points you raise - if you'd be willing to have a short call with us, we'd appreciate your input.

    Thanks,
    Adam
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  • tvandurmetvandurme Posts: 11 Bronze 1
    Grant said:
    Yay!

    Spotlight hides it's own activities from the monitoring results. It's kind of odd. I've never seen a monitoring tool do that before.
    Just would like to add a note to this now that we've had SQL Monitor on board for some time.
    How would you explain the --RedGateIgnore comments inside the monitoring scripts you use? It seems SQL Monitor also hides itself... The predicate for reporting on top queries (using [tempdb]..[redgate_sqlmonitor_topqueries_xxx temp tables) includes 
    WHERE CHARINDEX('RedGateIgnore', batch_text) = 0

    Or maybe I'm misinterpreting this?

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  • skattie22skattie22 Posts: 11 Bronze 1
    PMFJI it would be nice if you can click on a SQL User Process and see what it is doing (SELECT doesn't tell you a great deal!), like sp_whoisactive does
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