PowerView and System Health Session– System

Previous posts in this series:

In the last post for this series, I had explained how to retrieve the I/O statistics from the System Health Session data. In this post, I will describe how to build a dashboard using the SYSTEM component of the sp_server_diagnostics output. This view will help DBAs track various errors which can get their blood pressure shooting to abnormal levels. The SYSTEM component tracks various errors like non-yielding conditions, latch related warnings, inconsistent pages detected and access violations for the SQL Server instance.

Armed with this information in a Power Pivot table, I created two calculated columns for DAY and HOUR on the time the event was reported. After that I created KPIs on the maximum number of non-yielding conditions, latch related warnings, inconsistent pages and access violations reported.

Now that I have my Power Pivot data, I created a new Power View sheet which tracks the created KPIs for each day and hour. The screenshot below shows the final view.

The first half is a 100% Stacked Bar graph showing the various errors that were reported each day. There is a slicer for Day available which allows to filter the data quickly.

The second half of the report is a matrix which shows the KPI status for which day with a drill-down capability for hour.

The third half of the report shows a card view with the actual number of issues reported for each event against a particular time.

As usual the Excel sheet is available on SkyDrive at: http://sdrv.ms/10O0udO

The query to fetch the data required to build this report is available below.


SET NOCOUNT ON

-- Fetch data for only SQL Server 2012 instances

IF (SUBSTRING(CAST(SERVERPROPERTY ('ProductVersion') AS varchar(50)),1,CHARINDEX('.',CAST(SERVERPROPERTY ('ProductVersion') AS varchar(50)))-1) >= 11)

BEGIN
-- Get UTC time difference for reporting event times local to server time

DECLARE @UTCDateDiff int = DATEDIFF(mi,GETUTCDATE(),GETDATE());

-- Store XML data retrieved in temp table

SELECT TOP 1 CAST(xet.target_data AS XML) AS XMLDATA

INTO #SystemHealthSessionData

FROM sys.dm_xe_session_targets xet

JOIN sys.dm_xe_sessions xe

ON (xe.address = xet.event_session_address)

WHERE xe.name = 'system_health'

AND xet.target_name = 'ring_buffer';

-- Parse XML data and provide required values in the form of a table

;WITH CTE_HealthSession (EventXML) AS

(

SELECT C.query('.') EventXML

FROM #SystemHealthSessionData a

CROSS APPLY a.XMLDATA.nodes('/RingBufferTarget/event') as T(C)

)

SELECT

DATEADD(mi,@UTCDateDiff,EventXML.value('(/event/@timestamp)[1]','datetime')) as [Event Time],

EventXML.value('(/event/data/text)[1]','varchar(255)') as Component,

EventXML.value('(/event/data/value/system/@latchWarnings)[1]','bigint') as [Latch Warnings],

EventXML.value('(/event/data/value/system/@isAccessViolationOccurred)[1]','bigint') as [Access Violations],

EventXML.value('(/event/data/value/system/@nonYieldingTasksReported)[1]','bigint') as [Non Yields Reported],

EventXML.value('(/event/data/value/system/@BadPagesDetected)[1]','bigint') as [Bad Pages Detected],

EventXML.value('(/event/data/value/system/@BadPagesFixed)[1]','bigint') as [Bad Pages Fixed]

FROM CTE_HealthSession

WHERE EventXML.value('(/event/@name)[1]', 'varchar(255)') = 'sp_server_diagnostics_component_result'

AND EventXML.value('(/event/data/text)[1]','varchar(255)') = 'SYSTEM'

ORDER BY [Event Time];

DROP TABLE #SystemHealthSessionData

END