Quick Start (Live Server Monitoring)

 

This topic describes how you can use SQL Nexus to perform near-realtime query performance and blocking analysis of a SQL Server 2005 instance.  For information about analyzing previously-collected Profiler trace data, see the Quick Start (Postmortem Analysis) topic. 

 

  1. Start SQL Nexus.  Connect to the SQL Server 2005 instance that you want to monitor.
  2. When prompted to start the SQLDIAG data collector, answer Yes.

    NOTE: You can run SQL Nexus on a remote machine, but the data collector always runs on the server being monitored.  Before you can perform remote monitoring, you must run SQL Nexus once on the server itself; this will register the data collector as a service.  Once the data collector service has been registered, you can monitor and start/stop data collection from any remote machine. 
  3. If the data collector was not already running when you started SQL Nexus, it may take a minute or so for the “sqlnexus” database to be created and for the initial set of live data to be loaded.
  4. Select a report to view from the left-hand pane. 
  5. To see the latest data, set the auto-refresh interval in the report toolbar.  You can also manually refresh the view by clicking the refresh icon in the toolbar.

 

When you exit the application, SQL Nexus will ask you whether you wish to leave the data collector running.  If you choose to leave the collector running, you can restart SQL Nexus at any time -- hours or days later -- and see the server’s recent performance history.  

Multiple SQL Server Instances

This release of SQL Nexus only supports monitoring one instance of SQL Server per monitored Windows server.  This restriction will be relaxed in a future release.  The first time you run SQL Nexus on a machine, SQL Nexus’ SQLDIAG service will be configured to monitor the SQL Server instance you asked SQL Nexus to connect to.  After this, if you connect SQL Nexus to another instance on this machine, you will not be able to view live performance data for that server; the collector will continue collecting data from the instance that you originally connected to.  If you wish to monitor a different instance on the machine, you must first unregister the collector service.  To do this:

 

  1. Run this command to stop the collector:

                sqldiag.exe STOP /Asqlnexus

  2. Check Service Control Manager to verify that the DIAG$sqlnexus service has entered the Stopped state.
  3. Run this command to unregister the service:

                sqldiag.exe /U /Asqlnexus

 

Data Purging

By default, a background job will purge all data older than 4 hours from the data warehouse.  You can increase this retention period by running this command in a query tool:

 

USE sqlnexus

EXEC sp_nexus_configure ' purge period (min)', '<new retention period (min)>'

 

Troubleshooting