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.
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)