04/17/13 In previous posts, I claimed that thresholds are a root of much evil in monitoring systems (not the root of all evil, but a root of much evil), and that we’ve developed th…
04/15/13 If you don’t know socat, you probably should. From its man: Socat is a command line based utility that establishes two bidirectional byte streams and transfers data betwee…
04/10/13 Why is a threshold-based alert such a disaster? There are two big reasons. Thresholds are always wrong. They’re worse than a broken clock, which is at least right twice a …
04/09/13 In this post I’ll tell a story that will feel familiar to anyone who’s ever monitored MySQL. Here’s a recipe for a threshold-based alert that will go horribly wrong, beyon…
04/08/13 This post is part of an ongoing series on the best practices for effective and insightful database monitoring. Much of what’s covered in these posts is unintuitive, yet vi…
12/20/12 I wrote a couple of posts previously on SQL Server consolidation. The first post tried to give insight on some of the problems and associated motivating factors that most …
12/20/12 Consider for a moment that you have a deck attached to your house. It is one story above ground level and is growing weaker with each passing year. The former homeowner pa…
12/20/12 I am seeing more than a handful of articles these days regarding SQL Server virtualization and/or consolidation. Lots of companies are coming forward to provide you tools …
12/19/12 We have customers using database mirroring, so I wanted to take some time to write a quick post regarding database mirroring and performance monitoring. Microsoft has publ…
12/17/12 I never cared for the phrase “wasted time” when it comes to something like performance tuning. Sure, we all feel that way, especially when we spend hours on something only…
11/15/12 Look, everyone makes mistakes. It’s true. But not all of us have the chance to make mistakes that end up costing millions of dollars in hardware and production support cos…
11/13/12 When are CXPACKET waits a problem? Note: This article, by Thomas LaRock, was posted 8/19/2013 and supercedes the previous version. This update has been made in response to…