More than minor amount of changes released.

Hi all SMT users,

We owe you a list of changes with a new release that has just happened, and you may have noticed already a few enhancements and new features in you local SMT.

We planned this release as minor hence the version number 1.6.1 but in the end it contains new reports, new data collections and in total more than 100 database changes. Simultaneously, we have been working on bigger changes, which will allow us and you as well better user management on a company level.

Let’s get to the changes in Server Monitoring and Tuning Tool (SMT) 1.6.1:

Reports’ changes:

• In the Storage performance detail report, you can see both read and write block sizes over time. On top of this, we added to the existing graphs showing latency new column series describing throughput, which helps with the correlation if latency was affected by the throughput of the respective database/file.
• Dashboard contains new sparklines and a new wait category chart showing details for the last 30 minutes and a new table with the longest requests on the server.
• New database size trend report – could help you if you need to predict future storage requirements.
  • Including table size trends as well, but needs to be configured first, go to the report for details.
• You can now view how many SQL enterprise features are enabled per instance and database. (Section Administration > Enterprise Level Features Enabled)
• Instance overview contains tempdb information and allows you to filter data for a group and disable comparison with the previous week. We added another tab where you may see attributes of your monitored estate‘s OS and SQL server.
• Query compare report got a massive performance tuning – give it a try.
• New filters at index usage table and details.
• Update the way of reporting high severity errors and allow better options to customize in the future.

If unsure about the location of the new feature or report try to use the search functionality, that was introduced in the previous version of SQL Server Monitoring and Tuning Tool (SMT 1.6).

Internal

• Tools can’t be run more than once per user and particular tool. This is a protection to avoid overloading your system with scanning database objects or system caches.
• Bugs and enhancements.

SMT 1.7 is already in progress, it will mainly cover some internal changes, like user management, but there will be new and interesting features for you as well.

On behalf of our dev team. 

Jiri Dolezalek