One of the most annoying questions i get is "My application went down last Tuesday aroun 9 AM, what happened?" I often want to reply "How should I know? How about calling me when it happens." But I don't, because I am not a complete jerk. Now I can answer that question because I have Performance Adivsor.
What happens is that customer will notice a problem with their application and check their error logs, the error log will give the dreaded "SQL Server Timeout Error" and logically the customer will think there was a problem with the SQL Server and contact me. In reality, the problem is almost never a SQL Server problem, but an application issue. Proving this another matter.
First of all the SQL Server does not timeout, the client connecting to the SQL Server is actually timing out, as I do not set a maximum timeout on the sql server. In the past, I was limited to error logs and the default logs to try to determine what was happening on the server at the time of their time out. Not much help. If there was a major issue it will appear there, but if there was a major issue I would already know about it. I could not tell them what was happening specifically with their database, perhaps their was a lock that caused the query to take longer than normal?
When SQL Sentry told me about their new product Performance Advisor, I was very excited. I bugged them for months to get my hands on it. Now the product can do all sort of cool real-time monitoring, but in reality I can't keep up with that as I just have too many servers. I use it to tell me about what happended in the past and about trends. I love being able to provide our customers with real information to help get to the root of the timeout. I can say at that time of your time out the server was using X% of CPU and your database executed the following statements and it took X ms to complete. It makes me look better and I can actually answer the what happened question.
Truthfully, I don't find many third party products useful, but this one I do like.
