SQL Server Database Dashboard - mini DBA


The Database Dashboard displays metrics and properties specific to an individual database.

Database dashboard

Charts

  • Sessions: Active, blocking and blocked requests and sessions.
  • Transactions Sec: The mainstay metric for monitoring sql database throughput capacity.
  • Executions: See how many stored procedure and trigger executions are occurring.
  • Disk IOs: Reads and writes by the database to disk. Understand the IO usage of each database here.
  • Index Activity: Scans, seeks, lookups and update operations are displayed here. Aim to reduce scans and maximize seeks through intelligent indexing.
  • Log Mb: Track how large and how full your transaction log gets. Out of control log growth may occur if long running transactions block log truncation.
  • Data Movement: Bulk Copy, backup, restore and shrink operations data throughput is tracked here. Any of these could slow down the database, often backups run during peak times will reduce transactional performance. This chart gives you a quick insight into how much data bandwidth is being used by these operations.
  • Disk Storage: Unallocated, heap, index and unused data file pages are shown. Look out for large amounts of heap use as it may mean tables you thought were indexed are in fact not.
  • Log Flush Waits: Log flushes should be as fast as possible. If they cannot execute straight away it means they are waiting for something else to operate on the disk. Identify disk IO contention here by looking for high numbers of waits.
  • Log Flushes Sec: Another way to view log flush data bandwidth and also the characteristics of how many flushes each database needs to perform.
  • Log Kb Flushed Sec: Log data bandwidth.
  • Average Log Kb Per Flush: Log flushes are limited to 64kb so there is an orange line to show the limit. Write T-SQL to try to flush as much data up to that limit per flush. Low data size flushes are not efficient.
Mouse over any graphs for details of the underlying counters.

Activity counters such as transactions & log flushes are the 'Per Second' values, therefore you may see values of less than 1 depending on you sample interval.

Database Properties

On the right can be seen the database properties. Mouse over any property labels to be given a link to the associated MSDN article for the property. The properties will automatically update every 10 minutes and do not require an explicit refresh by you.
Database dashboard property link