Spotlight for the Big Screen
A customer recently asked how it would be possible to get Spotlight for SQL Server Enterprise to show up on a big screen in their office. There are a number of ways. A Windows desktop could be used t...
Setting email to different address at different times of day
A customer recently asked if the value that Foglight uses for email (to, cc, etc.) could be set to a different value at different times of the day. It can actually do one or the other, and with a litt...
Find the Top Application Servers Loading up your Database
A customer recently asked if there was a way to find the top application servers that were placing load on their database instances. With Foglight Performance Investigator, it is very easy. Start with...
Not for the Faint-Hearted: Foglight and SSL Certificates
Our team is starting to see an uptick in Linux installs for Foglight components, specifically the Foglight Agent Manager (Fglam). Most of these are done at the command line, which can make some settin...
Checking Query Plans for Columnstore Index Candidates
A customer asked recently if there is a way to find SQL that references objects that are a certain size. They are evaluating historic queries on tables to find possible candidates for conversion to co...
Exceptional Database Exceptions in Foglight
A common question is how to make an exception for 1 or 2 particular databases for certain rules in Foglight. A good example is the "days since last backup" rule for SQL Server. The global default appl...
Diagnosing Historical Sessions in SQL Server TempDB
In the recent 5.7.5.50 release of Foglight for SQL Server, a change was made to the TempDB drilldown. Specifically, the Sessions tab would formerly show the current sessions, regardless of the time ra...
Exposing Foglight User-Defined Collection Data
This post will cover one way to make it easy easier to get the user-defined collection data onto a dashboard or report. For a quick refresher, please see User Defined Collections in Foglight for SQL S...
Reporting on Changes to Foglight Registry Variables
Registry variables in Foglight are mostly used as placeholders in rules in order to avoid hard-coding in values. For example, a rule to check cpu utilization over a certain percentage could be coded ...
Measuring the Impact of Meltdown and Spectre Patching on your Databases
The new year kicked off with some big news on January 3rd, 2018 with the news of the Meltdown and Spectre chipset vulnerabilities. There are a lot of resources available to understand the details and ...
Foglight.. Start Your Engine!
This post is short but hopefully useful. When you start the Foglight server and navigate to the home page URL (http://foglight_server:8080 or https://foglight_server:8443), you may see a startup splas...
You’re Fired! Wait, What has Fired?
Foglight has many out of the box rules to evaluate performance and availability conditions for your databases, virtual and physical infrastructure, web pages, network devices, etc. Once it has been ru...