Database Health Monitor

Database Health Monitor

Database Health Monitor is a performance monitoring and diagnostics solution for SQL Server databases. It can give DBA's and administrators who do not have access to enterprise tools like  Idera’s SQL Diagnostic Manager or Spotlight an overview of the health of a SQL Server database. 

It can also help identify performance or availability problems within their SQL Server environment, all from a central console. According to the Database Health website "there have been 7000 installs of Database Health Monitor world wide in the last 3 years".

The performance tool is aimed at those people responsible for managing anything from one to multiple SQL Servers.  It should allow the busy DBA to quickly check on the status of a database, find problems, and to remedy those problems.

The tool provides information about backups, disk space, duplicate indexes, index fragmentation, long running queries, one time use queries, plan cache,queries needing params, statistics, stored procs with the most logical writes, and unused indexes.

You can also quickly view reports on CPU usage, page reads by database, page writes by database, plan cache by database, queries needing params, and waits.

This tool is a great help when database tuning or just general day to day monitoring and administering.

V2.2a has just been released (5th December 2015). The latest version has a host of new features as well as bug fixes.

New features:

• Added a DBCC CheckDB dialog to run Check DB against a database. Reports status along the way and shows what is being checked as it gets scanned.

• Added a link to the checkDB report page from the QuickScan CheckDB message.

• CTRL+a for select all in the edit box on the missing indexes advisor.

• Making the ‘see more’ option stick when viewing the CPU by Hour Heatmap.

• Added a Disk Space Report into the instance level reports.

• Added color coding to the Last Known Good CheckDB report.

• Added right click copy to clipboard to the many of the charts. Now you can just copy the chart to the clipboard as an image.

• Adding filtering of the historic waits for CXPACKET.

• Adding links to the main server overview if there is a SQL Server update available.

• QuickScan report

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed the backup status report to include databases that have never had a backup. This was missed due to the join condition. Fixing button colors on the CheckDB dialog. Buttons didn’t look right on Windows Server 2012.

Some of the reports in the tool require a database compatibility level of 90 (SQL Server 2005) or higher.

Database Health was created by Steve Stedman of Stedman Solutions (twitter @sqlEmt) with the aim of helping DBAs and Developers find the performance issues or bottlenecks on SQL Server.

It is currently free as its in beta, but this could change in the future.

There is even an option on the Database Health website were you can request a new feature.

This may not have all of the features or glamour of an enterprise monitoring tool but for DBA’s on a budget this is great for monitoring and tuning.

Database Health can be downloaded from here - http://databasehealth.com/download/