Picture on SQL Server
Database Performance
IT Pros Share Their Views of Dell
Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise
A healthy database infrastructure is critical to any organization that needs data and services to run its operations. But to achieve peak database performance, database administrators (DBAs) must be able to effectively manage their data-bases – and the associated servers.
To efficiently discover and troubleshoot database performance issues before they negatively impact operations, DBAs need complete visibility into their environments. But proactively monitoring and preventing disruptions can be time consuming and difficult to achieve, especially for modestly staffed IT departments.
Dell Spotlight™ on SQL Server Enterprise Edition provides a comprehensive view of SQL Server database environments to help IT pros easily monitor, diagnose and optimize database performance around the clock. With features like intuitive overviews of enterprise health and performance and automated alerts, Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise has what it takes to ensure a solid, healthy database environment.
This white paper provides insights from three IT pros who participated in an intensive trial period with Dell’s Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise. Repre-senting the software, non-profit and healthcare industries, they share their thoughts on how this tool benefitted their SQL Server environments – and made their jobs easier.
In the course of their evaluations, the IT pros discovered benefits including: • The ability to detect and diagnose performance issues before
they affected business
• Instant alerts at the server level
• Mobile applications that enable them to monitor SQL Server database performance from anywhere, at any time
• Health checks and performance analytics to help maintain a constant awareness of their SQL Server performance
• A single console that displays the entire SQL environment through an intuitive GUI
Introduction
The following customer
stories are represented in
this paper:
Software
Frej Krook
Trimble Buildings
Non-Profit
Ben Pearman
USA Volleyball
Healthcare
Don Furu
ARJ Infusion
Services
Case
Study
1
Software
Frej Krook
Network Administrator
Company
Trimble Buildings
Employees
250–500
“I’ve actually used Spotlight to sell management
on memory and hard drive upgrades… With a GUI
that’s easy for anyone to understand, I’ve done
screen captures and shown where bottlenecks are
occurring to justify the need for more equipment.”
- Frej Krook
Providing a portfolio of hardware, software and services that make the construction industry more pro-ductive, Trimble Buildings’ solutions cover the entire construction process, from designing to building to oper-ating new buildings. The company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Califor-nia with 350 employees spread across seven locations in the US.
Trimble Buildings relies on a stack of SQL Servers that support production demonstrations, evaluations, quality and assurance, and development. The SQL Servers are also tied to a Micro-soft CRM application.
Frej Krook, Trimble Buildings’ net-work administrator, is responsible for all these SQL Servers, along with the support of five other IT pros. Krook was eager to apply Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise to his SQL Servers to gauge their effectiveness. “My SQL Servers tied to quality and assurance and evaluation are in a constant state of flux,” Krook said. “I’m always on the lookout for index-ing issues, backups that don’t take,
and performance issues caused by someone who decides to load a bunch of extra work on them. I was looking for something that would enable me to see quickly, diagnose and then drill down to find the cause of the problems.”
Becoming reacquainted
with a familiar interface
Krook was already a fan of the Spot-light on SQL Server Enterprise GUI and was looking forward to engaging with the application again. He was happy to see the single console and easy-to-use GUI that enabled him to quickly drill down to the problem. “It’s such a time saver when trouble-shooting problems,” he said. “With Spotlight, if I get a red light on the Heatmap, I can drill down to find the issue before it becomes a problem, especially with indexing and backup issues that normally don’t trigger an alert.”
During the evaluation, the tool’s instant alert feature notified Krook when the servers were about to be overused by employees creating new databases. “I found that somebody was tinkering around without having the best grasp of what they should be doing – and I was able to jump in and take care of it before it became an issue,” he said.
This type of early warning was enhanced by the ability to create customized alerts, which Krook set on multiple production servers. The alerts were easily configured on a per server basis.
The ability to conduct health checks and create historical data or bench-marks also enabled Krook to look back at where problems occurred and make changes to prevent future problems. It’s also helped him secure necessary upgrades.
“I’ve actually used Spotlight to sell management on memory and hard drive upgrades,” he said. “With a GUI that’s easy for anyone to understand, I’ve done screen captures and shown where bottlenecks are occurring to justify the need for more equipment. Because the view is so easy to un-derstand, management can look at it and see how our SQL Servers are running.”
In the spirit of selling upgrades, Kro-ok said he’s planning to pitch Spot-light for SQL Server Enterprise to the IT department of his parent company Trimble, with customers in more than 150 countries. Given the size of the business and the complexity his col-leagues face, he thinks this tool can help them just as much as it did him. “A tool like this makes me look like I know what I’m doing, and that I know what’s happening around me, that I can fix problems quickly and really knock things out fast,” Krook said. “But when others see how all the information is represented and how it flows, the tool kind of sells itself.”
Case
Study
2
Non-Profit
Ben Pearman
Technology and
Network Operations
Coordinator
Company
USA Volleyball
Employees
50–100
“Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise gives me
the ability to know exactly what’s going on and
how to fix it, which allows me to spend time on
other things.”
- Ben Pearman
USA Volleyball (USAV) is the national governing body for volleyball in the United States. The non-profit orga-nization based in Colorado Springs, Colorado is responsible for selecting and supporting US national teams that compete in international vol-leyball competitions, including the Olympic Summer Games.
Ben Pearman, USAV technology and network operations coordinator, is one of three IT professionals sup-porting the organization. USAV relies on Pearman and his team to keep its servers up and running to sup-port tournaments on the road, and to maintain a program that streams live games for coaches and scouts to evaluate players.
USAV’s SQL Server environment plays a role by ensuring the team’s Mic-rosoft SharePoint and Lync services keep pace with the organization’s work.
Pearman joined the Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise evaluation with little experience in enterprise mon-itoring. He hoped the tool would serve up a quick understanding of the practice, as well as the condition of his databases.
“When we began evaluating Spot-light, I wanted to come away with a good idea of the fundamental health of the databases we use,” he said. “Once I got through the easy instal-lation and saw what it could offer me, I was immediately a fan. This was the first time I had a good pulse on our database servers.”
Pearman discovered that Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise immediate-ly read the active traffic data patterns of the company’s conferencing server, providing a view of everything that was happening on the server and beyond.
“This was insanely cool,” he said. “I was looking at everything from pro-cessor utilization to network traffic, to the number of times it was hit-ting the database and archiving. The visual experience on screen was like sitting in a waterpark playhouse and looking at all the pipes and spigots. It was the first time I had a full look at our SQL network and how it was performing.”
Pearman said Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise detected and fixed a problem with USAV’s SharePoint database, which was fragmented and slowing SharePoint performance. Up until then, no one was aware of the problem – but everyone noticed the faster performance later.
“After Spotlight had resolved the is-sue, it was amazing how much faster our SharePoint performance was,” he said.
The software also alerted him and his team to a miscommunication prob-lem between the SQL database and their communications server, which was quickly resolved.
Tracking performance
from anywhere, any time
Pearman also was impressed by the tool’s ability to keep him connected no matter where he was. With the tablet capabilities, he was able to carry his monitoring tool with him to meetings, lunches and at home after work.
“I used the tablet version of the mon-itoring tool quite a bit,” he said. “At staff meetings people would look at me staring at my tablet and wonder what I was so giddy about. This kind of mobility is vital, especially with an IT team of just three people.”
Pearman said he also used the tablet and Spotlight on SQL Server En-terprise as a dedicated monitoring device when working at his desk to quickly glance down and see the status of his SQL environment.
In addition, Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise was lightweight and easy to deploy, taking up few resources in exchange for enormous insight and monitoring capabilities. Pearman loaded both the client and server side of the software on a VM with minimum impact on the overall pool. The payoff, he said, is knowing about problems before they occur and having a complete assessment of the situation instead of relying on the user’s version of the problem. “Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise gives me the ability to know exactly what’s going on and how to fix it, which allows me to spend time on other things,” he said. “Anyone who has an SQL environment should give this a whirl. It will tell you things about your setting that you didn’t know yourself. Spotlight has given me binoculars into my database.”
Case
Study
3
Healthcare
Don Furu
Network Administrator
Company
ARJ Infusion Services
Employees
50–100
“To be able to see everything in one place was very
refreshing. Everything was right there. I had never
seen something like this before, at this level.”
- Don Furu
ARJ Infusion Services specializes in infusion therapy for people affected by chronic disorders. Infusion ther-apy involves the ongoing delivery of medications through needles or catheters, which ARJ provides in the comfort of a personalized home setting.
The company has more than 50 employees located in Lenexa, Kan-sas, who serve on teams that offer nursing and pharmacy support, patient services and even translators. Employees rely on a database and medical software application on an SQL Server that provides access to patient records, drug inventories, and updates on shipping and deliv-ery. Another SQL Server is used as a repository for digital documents. Don Furu, ARJ network administra-tor, is responsible for keeping the database running at full speed no matter how many employees are accessing it at one time. “The patient records server is our lifeblood,” he said. “If we lost that, we’d be down, and down hard.”
Furu used Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise to gain a wide view of the patient records SQL Server to see how well it could stand up to heavy use. “Mainly we were looking forward to seeing the wide overview of our servers,” he said. “To be able to see everything in one place was very re-freshing. Everything was right there. I had never seen something like this before, at this level.”
Saving time spent on
server evaluations and
diagnostics
Supporting the company’s IT with just himself and a director, it’s diffi-cult for Furu to carve out the extra time needed to run diagnostics on his servers. Furu views Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise as a major timesaving advantage with features like Heatmap, which shows the server conditions on a red, yellow or green indication.
He said before, it could take up to 45 minutes a day to manually run diagnostics to a level comparable to Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise. That’s 45 minutes out of his day that he could spend on more critical needs.
“It would definitely save me a lot of time in the morning,” he said. “To be able to spend just five minutes before starting my day to check out every-thing and then monitor it throughout the day would be great. Everything is right there in front of you, which makes it easy to flip through and see if everything is green and know that you’re in good shape. That would save at least two to three hours a week, which is important to me, as the sole IT contact.”
