Prior to being a full-fledged DBA, I was a SQL Developer for a Warehouse Management System called HighJump. HighJump is a very fast paced system with system owners who partner very closely with IT. This also means, that I was working closely with people who were very sensitive any system issues and wanted answers fast.
I was just making the move from SQL Developer to DBA when I first learned of Idera’s Diagnostic Manager. My first task to was to learn more about this product that the DBA who I was replacing convinced my new boss to buy 10 licenses of.
So when I learned that Diagnostic Manager would record the state of the SQL Instance every “x” minutes (user defined), I was very excited. This meant that I could go back in time to see what was happening during the “the system was slow between 5:00 and 5:30 yesterday morning”.
The next time I saw an e-mail asking what happened that morning around 4:00AM, I jumped into action. I opened Diagnostic Manager and clicked on the SQL Instance in question and hit the History Browser window:
[
][1]
On the right side of the screen, we can now navigate the Calendar to quickly go back to a specific day. Because the issue I was looking at was from that day, I figured I just needed to scroll down to 4:00 AM and start looking at the different metrics. Well imagine my surprise when I couldn't find anything from before 8:00 AM! I looked at previous days and they only had data from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM...
I starting thinking that I missed a setting when I added this Instance. Maybe Diagnostic Manager is only captures data between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM?
After looking around for what felt like hours, I sent Idera’s Support an e-mail. Idera’s Support is top notch. I got a reply within an hour with the exact details that I needed.
If you notice, in the above screenshot there is a blue link right below the Calendar that says “Between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM”. If you click on that link you will get this screen:
[
][2]
Like most people, we are a 24/7/365 shop and I need to be able to look at snapshots from any point of time. So I chose the top option “Show all snapshots”. Now I can see all of my snapshots!
I encourage you to learn more about Idera and to start a free trial of Diagnostic Manager.
https://twitter.com/#!/Idera_Software
http://www.idera.com/Content/Home.aspx
[1]: /media/users/kconan/DM - History Browser Button.jpg?mtime=1331600719 [2]: /media/users/kconan/DM - History Browser Options.jpg?mtime=1331600726
