Welcome to “Feature Friday”, a series of (typically short) videos which explain a feature, function, or technique.
Alerts are, for many monitoring engineers, the bread-and-butter of their job. What many fail to recognize is that, regardless of how graphical and “Natural English Language” the alert builder appears, what you are really creating is a query. Often it is a query which runs frequently (every minute or even more) against the entire database.
Because of that, a single, poorly-constructed query can have a huge (and hugely negative) impact on overall performance. Get a few bad eggs, and the rest of the monitoring system – polling, display, reports, etc – can grind to a crawl, or even come to a halt.
Luckily there’s a tool which can help you discover a query’s execution performance, and identify where the major bottlenecks are.
In the video below my fellow Solarwinds Head Geeks and I channel our inner SQLRockstar and dive into query execution plans and how to apply that technique to SolarWinds Orion alerts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g7Y-MFMVhg
For more insights into monitoring, as well as random silliness, you can follow me on Twitter (@LeonAdato) or find me on the SolarWinds THWACK.com forums (@adatole)