SQL Server Tips by Robin Schumacher

Active vs. Passive Monitoring

Up until now, this book has been addressing passive monitoring through tracking statistics and running diagnostics on activities produced by the user community. In addition to passive monitoring, there is another form of monitoring finding favor with proactive shops; active monitoring. Active monitoring takes the approach of simulating work: transactions; queries; DDL, etc; and recording the response times of that specific work.

The idea behind active monitoring is the establishment of a baseline of the length of time a particular piece of work should take and then periodically re-introduced to see if any performance deviations occur. If the DBA desires, active monitoring measurements can become a part of the statistics collected for capacity planning purposes.

An example of an active monitoring framework is the sp_minibench stored procedure. Written by Tom Sager, it helps gauge the performance of several different types of activities and provides an overall benchmark of information that can be gathered and tracked over time.

The above book excerpt is from:

High-Performance SQL Server DBA
Tuning & Optimization Secrets

ISBN: 0-9761573-6-5
Robin Schumacher

 http://www.rampant-books.com/book_2005_2_sql_server_dba.htm