SQL Server Performance Forum – Threads Archive

Monitoring user stress levels

Hello everyone! I’ve been poking around on the forums a bit but seem unable to find what I am looking for, but maybe I’m not querying right. In any case here is my situation, any advice you can provide would be greatly appreciated. We are also not afraid to purchase and 3rd party tools that might provide what we are looking for… We currently have SQL 2000 Standard running on a Dual Xeon 3.6GHz Dell with 4GB of RAM. Frankly I don’t want to get into the hardware too much as that’s not really what I think is our "problem". We are in the process of purchasing a new server with 1.5TB of dataspace and quad procs with SQL 2005 Enterprise, but that is still a couple months away and it’s the "answer" that most people think will solve our "problem". While I think it may help, I still think we’ll hit some of the "problem". We are running a "boxed" application – Microsoft Business Solutions Dynamics GP. So, the application, the underlying queries, and the database structure ARE NOT alterable by us. What I would like to accomplish is this: Our users log in to the application via ODBC and each user has their own "SQL login" via the application. I would like to be able to identify WHO is doing "something" at any given point, how much stress that "something" is doing to the server and ideally what that "something" is. I’m not interested in the moment in trying to optimize the "something" but identify it and determine if it can be done on our Data Warehouse server to offload some of the stress. The "problem" is that there are times when our server slows to a crawl and while it eventually improves, it never gets to "fast" again until we completely reboot it. Did that make sense? So, either a reporting software package, monitoring package, etc. that we don’t have to spend a lot of time learning as we are under-staffed. Would also consider consulting services if services are guaranteed and pricing is reasonable. I’ll leave it at that now. I’ll respond to questions as I’m sure there will be some, although I’m at training next week and am not sure of my internet access while there…so hopefully I can participate in the discussion <img src=’/community/emoticons/emotion-1.gif’ alt=’

‘ /> Thanks and have a great weekend! Rob

my opinion is that the 3rd party performance monitoring tools are nearly worthless and just as likely to cause problems
of course, i am bias as i am building my own tool for this purpose current performance monitoring tools can generate alerts, but the alerts may or may not indicate a true problem (false postive)
they may also not detect a true problem (false negative) 3rd party tools may be helpful in collecting info from multiple sources that you could have done anyways on the matter of hardware for DW,
almost no one sets of the disk system appropriate to handle TB size data
see my post in the HW sections

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