New Custom Conditions Pack (July 2016)

SQL Sentry has a new Custom Conditions Pack available for download today. There are a variety of conditions to assist you with monitoring your servers and staying ahead of potential problems through this intelligent alerting feature. While there are a broad range of topics covered, many conditions in this pack focus on files (data, logs, and tempdb) and CPU schedulers.

The New Conditions:

• Availability Replicas Hosted on Same Virtual Host
• Availability Replicas with Disks in Same Datastore
• Check Constraints Not Trusted
• Check Data File Size
• Check Error Log Size
• Check Transaction Log File Size
• Contention in Memory Objects
• CPU Schedulers Failed to Create Worker
• CPU Schedulers Hot Added
• CPU Schedulers Visible Offline Status
• CPU Unused Schedulers
• Data File Growth
• Data File Shrink
• Database Files Count Change
• Foreign Keys Not Trusted

• High Ad Hoc Query Plans
• High Average Work Queue Count
• High CPU For Single Core
• High CPU Signal Waits
• High Pending Disk IO Count
• High Redo Completion Time
• High Runnable Tasks Count
• Incorrect Compatibility Level
• Log File Growth
• NUMA Disabled
• Page Verification Check
• SQL Server Process Physical Memory Low
• SQL Server Process Virtual Memory Low
• Tempdb Data Files
• Tempdb Low Unallocated Page Count

Customize the Conditions

These conditions are called 'custom', therefore, you are encouraged to customize them to best meet your needs in the case that the default settings do not. First, simply right-click on any existing condition and choose the 'Clone' option from the context menu. Once you've selected a name for your new condition, change the pieces as desired and save it. Now you have a custom condition that is truly custom for your system.

Cloning a Custom Condition

Don't Forget the Alerts

Next, assign alerts to the conditions you wish to use. Another key point about custom conditions and alerting is that you have the ability to enable/disable/snooze any conditions that you download. In fact, there is a detailed post on SQL Sentry Intelligent Alerting for more information on how to use the alerting feature.

First of all, if you did not receive an alert about the latest Custom Conditions Pack, you may have the automatic check turned off in your user preferences (the automatic check occurs once daily). As can be seen in the image below, you can change this setting via Tools --> User Preferences --> Updates:

User Preferences for Updates

Additionally, you can manually download the pack by selecting Tools --> Download Latest Custom Conditions Pack:

Option to Download Latest Custom Conditions Pack

Finally, once the Custom Conditions have been downloaded, don't forget to apply the desired actions to them.

As shown above, we are actively creating conditions that we believe will assist you in monitoring and auditing your servers. Are there custom conditions that you would like to see in a future pack? If there's something you have in mind, please leave a comment on what you would find useful. Want to build your own conditions? Check out this post for some guidance on the logic behind Custom Conditions.