8. Schedule Performance Monitoring

Have you ever been burned by a "hung" job that never failed, but chewed up valuable resources and caused performance problems?

SQL Sentry Event Manager continuously monitors job and task runtimes and generates alerts based on defined minimum or maximum runtime thresholds. You can set thresholds at the global, server, or job-level and be alerted whenever any job, task, report, or DTS package in your enterprise runs above or below a certain percentage of its "average" runtime, as well as an explicit value such as "1 hour".

Monitor Schedule Performance
Event Manager makes it simple to link any Windows performance counter directly to any job, task, or report and see exactly what impact it's having on performance throughout its run lifetime. Event Manager automatically enables and disables counters as needed, minimizing server and network overhead. Refer to the Event Manager Users Guide section on Performance Monitoring for information on the configuration of Event Object and General Performance Monitoring for your environment.

Monitoring Disk Contention
Unusually heavy contention for disk resources can dramatically impact SQL Server performance, and Event Manager makes it a simple matter to see exactly what role jobs are playing in this issue. Many types of jobs are some of the biggest offenders since they incur disk IO's outside of the SQL Server process space, meaning SQL Server isn't in direct control of prioritizing all of the reads and writes.

With Event Manager you can quickly get at the root of disk-related performance issues by linking disk-related performance counters to a job with a few mouse clicks. Event Manager will automatically start and stop the counters according to the job's schedule, and generate insightful graphs which visually correlate the job's run lifetime with performance counter activity. See Monitoring Disk Contention for more detail.

"SQL Sentry Event Manager has improved our business and our work environment. Clients and management have noted the positive effect. Event Manager removed the job management burden and has given us the insight and capabilities to improve our systems and applications everyday!"
-- Scott Brooks, Director of Hosting Services, Peak 10, Inc.