6. Viewing the Data Collector Data
The data collector is now running on the server
where you designated it. It’s collecting the data and storing it in the
cache directory you defined. To start to view this data, you need to
first get it from the cache directory to the management data warehouse.
All the collection jobs are set up and running, but they’re not
transmitting the data collected, and this transmission must be started.
Initially, you can do this manually. Later, you may want to set up
scheduled jobs through the SQL Agent to gather the data collector data.
To get the data manually, right-click any of the defined data
collection sets, and choose Collect and Upload Now from the context
menu. This will take the data from the disk cache and load it into the
management data warehouse. It’s now ready for viewing. You should
perform this step if you’re following along to have data visible in the
next steps.
The data is available in standard tables, so
you could access it directly through SQL queries if you wanted.
However, the data collector comes installed with a few standardized
reports. If you right-click the data collector icon in the Object
Explorer window, you can select Reports from the context menu and then
select Management Data Warehouse from there. With the default install,
three reports are available:
- Server Activity History
- Disk Usage Summary
- Query Statistics History
Server Activity History
If you select the first item in the list,
Server Activity History, you’ll see a window with a number of charts.
All this information represents basic server-level data, showing
information such as the amount of CPU or memory used, what processes
are waiting when running inside SQL Server, and the aggregated number
of activities over time. All of this information is very useful for
performance monitoring and tuning. There are so many charts that we
can’t show them all in a single figure. The top half of the report will
look like Figure 10.
Figure 10. Server Activity History report, top section
At the top, you can see which server the data
is being displayed for. Below that is the time period for which the
data is being displayed, and you can modify or scroll through the
various time periods using the controls provided. As you change the
time period, the other graphs on the chart will change. Immediately
below the controls, the time range currently selected is displayed. In
the case of Figure 10, it’s showing a time range between “4/24/2009 2:00AM” and “4/24/2009 6:00AM.”
Next are a series of graphs showing different
information about the system. Each graph, where appropriate, shows
information about the operating system and SQL Server, color-coded as
green and blue, respectively. These graphs are nice, but if you need
detailed information, you need to click one of the lines. Figure 11 shows the detail screen for the % CPU for the system.
Figure 11. % CPU Time per processor details report
You can see that once more you have the ability
to change the time frame for the report. It also displays a nice graph,
even breaking down the behavior by CPU and, finally, showing aggregate
numbers for % CPU over the time period. Each of the separate graphs in
the main window will show different detail screens with more
information specific to that performance metric. To navigate back to
the main report, you click the Navigate Backward button located near
the top of the window.
Back on the main window of the Server Activity History report, the bottom half of the report looks like Figure 12.
Figure 12. Server Activity History report, bottom section
Once again, these are incredibly useful reports
all by themselves, showing the SQL Server waits broken down by wait
type and showing SQL Server activity broken down by process type. With
either of these reports, it is possible, as before, to select one of
the lines or bars of data and get a drill-down menu showing more
information.
Note
Initially, immediately after starting the data collector, your graphs
might be quite empty. As more data accumulates, the graphs will fill
in. You can also use the Timeline tool to zoom in on smaller time
slices to get a more complete picture.
