Case Study Geeks with...sql Monitor How Geekswithblogs.net uses SQL Monitor to look after their servers and keep users around the world happy. Introducing Geekswithblogs.net Problems faced How SQL Monitor Helps Us How SQL Monitor Continues to Work for Us 2 3 4 7
Introducing Geekswithblogs.net Geekswithblogs.net is one of the largest technical blogging communities with over 3,000 bloggers. The community focus is on developers and IT professionals who are passionate about sharing information with peers. Our community has consistently delivered high quality content since 2003. Just like many online communities, we grow daily. As we receive more and more users on our system, performance is the main focus. We reached out to Red Gate to see if they had a product that could help us keep an eye on the hidden statistics that SQL Server provides, allowing us to stay on top of problems before our users alert us to them. Geekswithblogs.net is a worldwide community, but we are based in Kansas City, Missouri. When someone in India has a problem and they search for a solution at the start of their day, I and others on my team are most likely sleeping. Our online users need a system that delivers content quickly and bug free. I need a system that can let me know if something on my servers is not acting right. Red Gate stepped up to the plate for us with SQL Monitor. 2
Problems faced Speed of page delivery is critical. Readers need to be able to get their content quickly and page speed can affect search engine placement. Long-running queries could go unnoticed. We needed daily statistics of blogger registration and blogger content production. We wanted to know why deadlocks happen and who is causing them. We wanted to view server performance without the need for RDP access 3
How SQL Monitor Helps Us With SQL Monitor we were able to deliver the appropriate data to the hands of the developers and site administrators. These are the people who need to know what is going on at any time and be alerted when something is out of the ordinary. SQL Monitor Alerts We ve seen the biggest benefit from the Alerts functionality that s at the core of SQL Monitor. When we have a better understanding of the events that have occurred and all the statistics that go along with the event, it s easier to troubleshoot the problem. The event statistics we use most often are Processor Usage, Memory Used, Disk Queues, Disk Transfer, Cache Hit Ratio, and Connections. These events are not only just the data at the time of the event, but also before and after delivered in a line graph. By seeing the data in this format, we can determine how the system was acting during the event and also what variables might have caused the event to happen. So much power is given to the user that many problems are solved at a much faster pace. 4
Active Profiling from the Dashboard As seen in the figure above, we get instant results of how the system is performing not only when something happens, but when the system is running normally. We can see Buffer cache, General SQL Server statistics, Memory usage, and data about the Host machine. The data gives us a better idea of the performance of the system without the need for Activity Monitor in SQL Server Management Studio and Task Manager in Windows Server. We can see if tweaks need to be made or if we have grown beyond what our current system can handle. Embedded Expertise and Descriptions Our team is made up of developers and architects. This leaves us with a lot of skills when it comes to developing databases and optimizing the data for performance, but there is definitely a lot more to SQL Server hosting. SQL Monitor helps the DBA and developers by giving Embedded Expertise they have developed from interacting with over a thousand DBAs. This expertise is invaluable when you are facing a statistic you just don t know how to react to. Within the User Interface, you learn more about what you are looking at and how it affects the system. These guidelines and explanations are very detailed and deliver the appropriate information about the statistic you are reviewing without the fluff that goes along with most articles. 5
Custom Alerts I run several queries a day and look for specific values to determine the health of our site. If I needed to deliver these values to someone who was a business user, I would just build a dashboard or report to deliver. SQL Monitor has a great feature that allows you to schedule a query and set a threshold on the values that you consider worthy of notification and a level to the alert. If we average a few hundred comments on a regular day, I want to know if there is a spike as nine times out of ten, that means a blog spammer has hit the site, and I have some scrubbing of content to do. If we average ten to fifteen blog posts a day, I want to know if we are under that average so I can go interact with bloggers to see what is going on. Custom Alerts continuously deliver those numbers to me and I can spend less time running queries and more time building features. 6
How SQL Monitor Continues to Work for Us We use SQL Monitor daily to respond to alerts or gather statistics about how new features have affected the system. The system was very easy to install and configure, and anyone on our team who helps manage the production environment can open a browser and start reviewing the data. Recently we released a piece of software that was very data intensive as it reviews every entry in the blog content table in order to find matching categories by keywords. In development and testing, we just do not see the same load on the system that we receive in production. Everything looked fine, but once we launched, SQL Monitor alerted us to some deadlock issues and long-running queries that were caused by the new system. Very quickly we were able to jump on the problems, publish a patch, and monitor the success of the patch. These types of events end up giving us the peace of mind that should come along with hosting software solutions in this modern environment. We have seen so many advancements in technology and performance, but knowing what is going on with your software and databases are areas where most outof-the-box solutions don t offer any help. At the price point that SQL Monitor lands in, you will easily see a return-on-investment immediately. Find out more about SQL Monitor at www.red-gate.com/products/dba/sql-monitor/ www.red-gate.com 7