Baselines for SQL Server and Windows

What are SentryOne Baselines?

SentryOne Baselines help you compare your SQL Server environment performance to established norms. SentryOne provides predefined baselines based on historical time ranges, as well as custom baselines. Once you establish a baseline, it's overlaid on the SentryOne Performance Analysis Dashboard charts for your monitored instances, giving you information that can help you manage performance across your environment, including Windows servers, VMware, SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), and Azure SQL Database.

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Do you have an accurate report card of your SQL Server performance?

As a DBA, your job is to monitor and optimize your SQL Server database environment and Windows servers. You undoubtedly have a lot of experience on how to keep your systems running smoothly.

But do you have a consistent, time-proven approach in place to compare and visualize the performance of your current environment against established baseline metrics?

Are you alerted when a metric exceeds a certain threshold? Can you create multiple baselines to compare the performance test results based on different SQL Server settings or workloads?

If you're frustrated by the time it takes to set and manage performance metrics for your SQL Server environment, take a closer look at SentryOne Baseline capabilities.

SentryOne provides the most comprehensive and intuitive baselining for SQL Server, SSAS, Azure SQL Database, Windows, and VMware.

Watch a quick tour of SentryOne Baselines in action.

Establish multiple baselines for your monitored environment with SentryOne

With SentryOne, you can easily create a baseline for your monitored environment from within the SentryOne Performance Analysis Dashboard. With established baselines, you can see at a glance when factors in your environment are atypical for that period.

Default Benchmarks

SentryOne, by default, provides a set of predefined baselines that show your server’s resource usage for a similar time period, such as a previous day or week. These baselines pull from the historical data that SentryOne has collected in your monitored environment.

Armed with this knowledge, you'll be able to see at a glance whether your database and Windows server utilization is atypical for a specific period, so you can actively prevent database slowdowns or outages.

Performance Analysis - Create Baseline Screenshot

Custom Baselines

With SentryOne, you can also define custom baselines. You can select the desired start and end date and time, then choose the metric in each chart that you want to set for the default baseline.

The baseline will be based on the average value of each parameter. But you can define custom values by editing the pre-calculated values. Once you've provided a name and description for your baseline and chosen your metrics and values, you can start using this baseline.

Global Baselines

You can also create global baselines and apply them to any of your monitored servers. You can use global baselines to compare server performance in your environment.

You can also use global baselines and SentryOne Advisory Conditions to alert you if your dashboard counter values have fallen outside of the average values defined by the baseline you've set.

What You Can Do with Performance Analysis Baselining

Set baselines for physical and virtualized Windows servers, SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), VMware, and Azure SQL Database
Use predefined baselines to analyze resource usage for a similar period, such as previous period, day, week, month, quarter, or year
Create custom baselines to monitor and compare server configuration changes or the impact of other intensive maintenance operations like index rebuilds
Create any number of baselines with friendly names and easily switch between them
Send alerts or take various other actions in response to deviations from baseline values
And much more

More about SQL Server Baselines

More resources

“In my opinion, the main benefit of SentryOne is trending and baselining. It gives us a good idea what times of day are normally heavy use, as well as grabbing the user and SQL text for problem queries. We can look at what is currently happening, but we can also go back and view historical charts and numbers.”

—Chuck Hieber, Database Administrator I, GreatAmerica Financial Services

Read more independent SentryOne reviews on TrustRadius.

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