I was fortunate enough to attend the PASS 2011 Summit in Seattle. If you do not know what I am speaking of when I say PASS I encourage you to check it out. PASS stands for Professional Association for SQL Server. The event that is put on yearly speaks for itself and I can dedicate a whole blog to just that but no; I’m going to speak of something I picked up while at the conference.

SQL Server MVP – Deep Dives Vol 2

This book has a plethora of valuable information and golden nuggets so much so I figured I’d implement something on my own that I can use everyday from it. There are countless number of good authors in this book

The Dashboard

I’m on a team that runs a full range of SQL servers from 2000 to 2012 on physical and VM’s, but chapter 12 stood out to me the other day which I decided to tried out. I’ve built reports and metrics in the Utility Database (idea spawned in my head after attending a session by Chris Shaw (B|T) but I started thinking of building a dashboard off the information.

Pawel Potasinski (B|T) wrote a chapter in this book called “Build your own SQL Server 2008 performance dashboard” – as I read through the chapter ideas started to spin in my head and before I knew it I was giving it a try.

I combined some of his ideas with the metrics I pull back using Glenn Berry’s (B|T) Diagnostic Queries and built a standard dashboard for myself that gets generated every morning when I walk in the door. In it I include some of the basics such as CPU, PLE, %Log Used. Pawel uses DMV’s and SQLCLR to get the performance counters; I’ve started to incorporate some extended events results in there as well.

Some additional items I’ll be incorporating in the near future is further drill downs into the details of the counters themselves and sharing the report out to the team I am on as a custom report. Once I have everything completed my plan is to make another post entry with the screen shots, code, etc.

In the end I would say I was not fully taking advantage of what SQL Server has to offer for me….are you? I’ve enjoyed digging further into Reporting Services and what I can leverage from it in administering databases I’m responsible for. Take a look at what your processes are and if it isn’t automated how can you better leverage your time and can it be automated?