SQL Stripes for SQL Server

By : Satya Jayanty Oct 29, 2005

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It is important to have a monitoring and management tool that can alert you to problems with SQL Server or its resources. A tool that can send an e-mail alert is especially important so you can obtain real-time alerts and take action instantly, if needed.

SQL Stripes, by PureNetworking.net, is a database management application that combines several monitoring and networking tools in a single interface. It helps a DBA monitor and control SQL Servers throughout a network and provides real-time alerts.

Features

Using SQL Stripes, together with Query Analyzer, offers flexible management and monitoring of your SQL Servers.

SQL Stripes displays essential information as an array of "stripes." Each stripe represents one SQL Server and contains the following information:

• Service status: Up, down, or up with invalid login alert.
• Agent status.
• Ping results.
• Scheduled jobs status.
• Available RAM.
• Disk space: Either free, used, or both.
• This can be configured to display disk space for all hard drives on the server, or only for drives that are used by the SQL Server program.
• Server name defined on the network.

Displaying relevant information about each server as a stripe provides a quick overview of the status of all the servers the DBA manages. Since the program doesn't use a lot of resources on a server, it can be installed and executed on a workstation with an auto-refresh configuration of any time interval. The auto-refresh feature has an option to provide the DBA with an e-mail notification when the ping test result fails, or when a SQL Server service is down.

SQL Stripes is equipped with a search feature that allows the DBA to search for a particular object — such as a table or stored procedure — or all the objects (see screen shot below). The DBA can output the server's valuable real-time data to HTML by enabling the feature as a group level Like Search. A "Search for Objects" is conducted in all opened stripes because the search engine connects all the SQL Servers into a single interface.

The search function offers additional options such as "WildCard Search" and "Include System Objects." The screen shot below shows the results of a sample search.

The report can be aligned to include system objects such as system tables or system stored procedures. The search can be limited to search for a specific column in a set of tables or used within a set of stored procedures.

Creating an HTML report is a straightforward process:

When the report is generated, a dialog box appears stating "View Report Now" with "Yes" and "No" buttons. The user can configure the path to save the output file. A sample report is displayed below:

If an error is found in a SQL Server database, SQL Stripes sends the user an alert message immediately. The product monitors the SQL Server environment, providing information on Extended Server components such as collation, default domain/logins, installation information, linked databases, operating system memory, and number of CPUs associated with each SQL Server. On the granular level of each database, the information SQL Stripes can provide includes the database name with owner, database size, database total and used free space, database status, backup status, and the SQL Server error log. It also includes database processes, such as simple or extended DBCC statements.