1. 2014: The Year of Dell™ Spotlight™
on SQL Server Enterprise

2. Intro
It’s that time again – a fresh start to a new year. It’s an opportunity to learn
from your mistakes and figure out ways to do things better, faster and smarter.
Spotlight™ on SQL Server provides in-depth physical, cloud and virtual SQL
diagnostics. DBAs get a full overview on enterprise health and performance,
along with automated alerts and actions. Best of all, Spotlight supports the
mobile DBA, allowing you to monitor your environment anywhere, anytime on
your mobile device with the free Spotlight mobile tool.
So pull out a pen and start your New Year’s Resolutions list. We’re pretty
confident that Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise will make its way into your
future plans.
Happy 2014!
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3. Resolution #1: Spend More Time At Home or Away
Go Mobile
Monitor your environment anywhere, anytime
on your mobile device with the free Spotlight
mobile tool.
If you get a non critical alarm on your mobile
device in the middle of the game – just snooze
it!
When you get back to the office use the
Spotlight Playback feature to reconstitute all of
your dashboards and diagnostic drill downs
exactly as they were when the issue occurred.
Now you can solve problems on your own
terms and on your own schedule.
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4. Resolution #2: Watch My Health
Free Spotlight Health Check Tool
Gain insight into the health of your SQL Server
environment with the free Health Check tool
and compare your experience with other users.
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5. Resolution #3: Get My Priorities Right!
Where Do I Start with Hundreds of
Instances to Manage?
Use the Heatmap to hone in on the
most critical issues at a glance.
Use the free performance analysis tools
in SpotlightEssentials.com to monitor
performance trends and focus on the
instances that most need your help.
Use the Spotlight™ Essentials tool to
start with the highest priority health
issues.
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6. Resolution #4: Add More Value
Spend Your Time on High Value-add Activity
Spend less time writing and maintaining low
value-add monitoring and diagnostics scripts.
Let Spotlight do it for you; along with the
ability to customize to your heart’s content,
you’ll receive:
• Over 50 standard metrics being monitored
• Diagnostic drilldowns to focus on any
troubleshooting challenge
• Nearly 30 out of box reports
• All the performance data you could wish
for
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7. Resolution #5: Stop Worrying
High-Availability Support
Limit the risk by using SQL Server’s most advanced high-availability
features with the reassurance that Spotlight is monitoring it 24/7 to
make sure it is ready to react in a heartbeat to any of life’s little
disasters.
Spotlight monitors SQL Server clusters, replication, database
mirroring and log-shipping activities and environments with
dedicated dashboards to make it easy.
LiteSpeed for SQL Server Integration
Dell Spotlight® now integrates with the Dell LiteSpeed backup and
recovery tool, watching over lightening fast backups with smaller
storage requirements.
.
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8. Resolution #6: Respond Faster
Diagnostics Drilldowns
Use the prioritization tools to zero-in
on critical instances as they occur.
Use Spotlight’s home page to find the
problem area.
By your third click, you are using
Spotlight’s Diagnostic Drilldowns
customized to best solve the specific
type of problem in hand.
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9. Resolution #7: Work on Your Terms
Spotlight Customization
You can build a monitoring
infrastructure that best reflects any
particular infrastructure and needs.
Add custom-counters to monitor your
own specific checks and balances.
Customize thresholds for any counter
alert to a level that makes most sense
for you.
Define customized actions that go way
beyond just sending an email – use
Powershell scripts to instantly solve
known issues.
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10. Resolution #8: Tell Your Boss How Good You Are
Use “Manager Friendly”
Communication Tools
Give your boss access to the browser
based heat map to show how the red
boxes are going green over time.
Use the Spotlight® Essentials Health
Check to show how your health is
improving.
Use Spotlight Essentials Performance
trends to show how you are improving
and how you benchmark against your
peers.
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11. Resolution #9: Get Fit!
Get the Fitness Check and put the plan
in place
Identify problems before they occur
within Spotlight and Spotlight
Essentials.
Benchmark and investigate indexing
strategies through integration with SQL
Optimizer for SQL Server (comes with
Spotlight on SQL Server Xpert Edition.)
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12. Resolution #10: Learn From Your Friends
Leverage the Collective Intelligence of
Thousands of Instances
Take the subjectivity out of the
conversation on Spotlight Essentials by
ranking the performance of your
instance against the billions of statistics
collected across the community.
Participate in our SQL Server
community of 3M database
professionals across all platforms and
with SQL Server MVPs to solve your
problems.
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