SQL Server Monitoring: What to start measuring

So you’ve got a SQL Server that you want to monitor. What should you monitor? In my opinion, at bare minimum, you want to collect wait statistics. Let’s talk about a basic wait statistics collection.

Our new best friend: dm_os_wait_stats

This is the only place we need to query. It’s a DMV that shows the wait statistics for the entire instance since the instance rebooted.

Setting up a scheduled query to collect wait statistics

We need a table to store the wait statistics. Here’s a basic script for storing wait statistics. I added all the columns from the DMV above, along with a column for server name and the datetime when the data was inserted.

CREATE TABLE wait_statistics_history
    (wait_statistics_id BIGINT IDENTITY(1,1),
    wait_type NVARCHAR(60),
    waiting_tasks_count BIGINT,
    wait_time_ms BIGINT,
    max_wait_time_ms BIGINT,
    signal_wait_time_ms BIGINT,
    server_name NVARCHAR(128),
    insert_datetime DATETIME DEFAULT(GETDATE()))
    GO
CREATE CLUSTERED INDEX cx_wait_statistics_id on
   wait_statistics_history(wait_statistics_id);

And here’s a query to insert into that table.

INSERT INTO [dbo].[wait_statistics_history]
           ([wait_type]
           ,[waiting_tasks_count]
           ,[wait_time_ms]
           ,[max_wait_time_ms]
           ,[signal_wait_time_ms]
           ,[server_name]
          )
     SELECT
           wait_type
           ,waiting_tasks_count
           ,wait_time_ms
           ,max_wait_time_ms
           ,signal_wait_time_ms
           ,@@SERVERNAME
      FROM sys.dm_os_wait_stats

Okay, what now?

Now we have a way to track wait statistics over time. Feel free to wrap that query in a stored procedure, and execute from a SQL agent job. I’d recommend collecting once an hour, but you can always change that threshold.

Also, consider filtering out wait statistics that you don’t care about. There’s a lot of resources online for finding which wait statistics are good vs bad.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned.