How many times do you use DMV’s daily supporting your SQL Server environments? How many of you rely on 3rd party tools for looking at the current snapshot of your SQL Server? Let me say this, I use DMV’s a lot even though I’m provided with fancy 3rd party monitoring tools. Each approach has it’s own pros and cons! Let’s assume our shop has no 3rd party tools for monitoring and we are just relying on native SQL Server mechanisms for all our monitoring. In that case, I can say 90% of the monitoring/Gathering Info will be done just using DMV’s. What if we’ve a free tool which displays the DMV results(of course, not everything..but all the useful info at a single glance) in a pictorial representation? That would be awesome right?? Well, most of the cases, I feel seeing something visually is much more self explanatory and efficient rather than just looking at figures and numbers. YMMV!
SQL Live Monitor can do the same for you. It’s a free tool available from CodePlex community. This tool don’t even require any Installation. It’s just an executable(222 KB) which runs on fly without installing anything on your Servers. Isn’t it cool??
Let me show you how it looks like when I run against one of my Lab Servers…I copied SQL Monitor exe to my Server as you can see below and I just double clicked on it….No other Fancy Stuff needed!
Immediately I was welcomed with the following Screen.
As you can see initially it’s not connected and It’s asking for SQL Instance Name, whether it’s a cluster or Standalone, If it’s clustered…what’s the current active node for your Instance….etc. In my case, It’s a standalone box. Once I selected my Driver(In my case it’s 2008 Native Client) and provided with Instance name and clicked Start…It is providing me all the cool info as you can see below…
Awesome….! Undoubtedly this is one of my favorite tools from codeplex 🙂 Yes, this is not as fancy as other 3rd party tools out there, but still it does the justice and serve the purpose with much much less pain!
I hope this tool will be helpful to atleast few of you while investigating your Servers….Btw, you can download this for free from http://sqlmonitor.codeplex.com/
MSSQLTREK 