Experience the power of enterprise monitoring of your SQL Server environment at no cost at all. Spotlight Freemium Edition is a plug-in that integrates with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)

1. Did you know
about
Spotlight
Freemium?
SQL Server DBA Professionals
Global Marketing

2. Tales from the Engine Room….
At PASS in Charlotte this year, we
released Spotlight Freemium
Monitoring in the form of a SQL
Server Management Studio plugin. We are working on expanding
this functionality to make it a more
useful tool so I thought I’d spend
some time filling you in on what we
are planning for early next year.
Bear in mind that this is all still under
development right now so things
may change before we ship – safe
harbour and all that.
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3. What are we working on?
More Flexible Deployment Options
Allow you, the SQL DBA, to install the Diagnostic Server (the service
that runs in the background and collects data, evaluates rules and fires
alarms) on a different machine to where your management studio
plug-in is installed.
The practical upshot of this is that if you have multiple DBAs, you can
all look at the same data and you only need to collect it once.
Toolbar
Let’s face it, you’re a busy DBA and
have better things to do that stare at
Spotlight all day. There will be a
Spotlight toolbar that will allow you to
see the high level status of your
environment at a glance while you are
busy doing other things – a single click
will take you to the Heat Map or the
Alarm List.
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4. Real Time Performance Health
SpotlightEssentials.com provides
users with a daily score for
performance health today. We have
decided that it would be a good idea
to provide this feature in real-time.
This feature will be in Spotlight on
SQL Server Enterprise as well. The
plug-in will provide basic summary
data – if you want the full resolution
path, you’ll have to upgrade to
Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise.
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5. Improved Summary Page
An improved layout of the summary page with some extra
useful bits of data – including the aforementioned
Performance Health score.
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6. Processes Drilldown
First thing you want to know when you look at a SQL Server is who is
doing what – enter the Processes drilldown. You can filter to just see
active processes, sort by any column (and we’ll remember the sorted
column for next time). Also, you have the option to kill the selected
process and if you want to see the SQL or the plan we can open it up
for you with a single click right in Management Studio.
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7. Waits Drilldown
The Waits drilldown helps you to see where your SQL Server
instances are spending time waiting.
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8. File I/O Drilldown
The File I/O Drilldown shows you what is going on with your data files. You
can see a list of all the data files on your SQL Server instance. This
drilldown effectively takes data, calculates rates on selected columns and
allows you to easily see the level of activity at a file level.
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9. Top SQL Drilldown
The Top SQL drilldown allows you to see the top 25 SQL statements in the
plan cache by average CPU per execution. Similar to the processes
drilldown, if you want to see the SQL or the plan we can open it up for you
with a single click right in Management Studio.
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10. This is exciting!
So far so
good…when
and where can I
get Spotlight
Freemium?
Global Marketing

11. Spotlight Freemium…what’s next?
We are working as fast as we can to finish these
features and make sure that it is solid, doesn’t use
large amounts of resources and doesn’t crash SQL
Server Management Studio.
You can find the latest version of Spotlight
freemium
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