I got to meet with the team who creates SQL Monitor today. (Yes, I have a very cool job!) Since I’m kind of new to SQL Monitor, they wanted to know what I didn’t like about it. Well, I had a hard time coming up with anything because I found it so easy to use. Once I had watched a couple of videos, I was able to find my way around easily. The tool seems very complete as well. Everything that I could think of that I wanted to monitor was either there by default or a script to add it as a custom metric was available.

Finally, I thought of something. I wanted to create an exception list for the ‘Database Unavailable’ alerts. When I went to the to the configuration page, I was hoping to see a way to add a database name that was set offline on purpose. This is what I saw:

I didn’t see any way to set up an exception list. It would get annoying really fast to be alerted about an offline database that was purposely offline.

I knew that it could be set across the organization, group, and instance. I didn’t realize, however, that it could also be set at the database level. Just by drilling down, I could turn this alert off for an individual database!

By default, settings are inherited from the organizational level. Below that, you can customize at the SQL Monitor group, server, instance and database level. For example, there are probably some metrics that are important for production servers that you don’t care about for development servers.

I’m back trying to think of something I don’t like about SQL Monitor. I’ll keep you posted about that. If you want to play with SQL Monitor, check out this live demo.  It’s actually monitoring Redgate’s live SQL Server instances. Enjoy!