Monitoring SQL Server on Linux performance with Performance Co-Pilot and Grafana By Louis Imershein

Session Title: Monitoring SQL Server on Linux performance with Performance Co-Pilot and Grafana
Speaker: Louis Imershein

Abstract: Recent advancements in open source projects make it easier than ever to do much more than just basic performance monitoring of SQL Server on modern Linux systems. In this talk we’ll look into two tools which have recently been enhanced to support SQL Server on Linux: Performance Co-Pilot (PCP), and Grafana.

PCP is a lightweight system performance analysis toolkit. Metrics are provided to PCP through Performance Metric Domain Agents (PMDAs). The PMDAs provide special-purpose modules that allow PCP to collect a wide range of specialized metrics. Recently, a PMDA for SQL Server was introduced as well as an ansible playbook to deploy and configure the PMDA across multi-server Linux environments. While PCP is used to collect metrics, Grafana is the web-based open source tool to display performance graphs and notify you of the unexpected. The new SQL Server Performance Dashboard for Grafana displays not only SQL Server data, but also important Linux system graphs that you can use to identify trouble spots. By the time you’re done with this talk you’ll understand: how to use PCP and Grafana to identify SQL Server on Linux performance problems and track down solutions.