Let’s get one thing straight from the start: I love monitoring products. I get really excited when there’s a new one because I think there’s still a lot of space for innovation in this market.
So when I got an email from ApexSQL announcing their new SQL Server monitoring product, I was excited. I clicked on it immediately and looked at the first screen shot in their announcement blog post:
The more things I looked at, the more horrified I got. Let’s take it from the top:
SQL Server isn’t capitalized correctly. I can forgive calling it “SQL server” in a small part of documentation, but on the app’s home page, in the very first screen shot? From a company that focuses on SQL Server? That’s…disappointing.
128,524 unchecked alerts. I get it, it’s probably a demo environment, but that tells me the software is going to spam the bejeezus out of me with alerts that don’t actually matter. I can’t expect a DBA to realistically prioritize 128,524 alerts. That’s not a server problem – it’s a monitoring tool problem, expecting humans to deal with that.
Maximum server memory: 0TB. What the hell does that mean? The server has no memory? That doesn’t even make sense. I’m guessing the SQL Server has less than 1TB of RAM (as most do) but the software isn’t smart enough to change the unit of measure to GB in that case, or display decimal points.
Minimum server memory: 0MB. Again, what does this even mean? What action do you expect a DBA to take based on this headline number? The numbers at the top of the product should be the most important ones, and clearly they’ve had the least amount of thought.
Network packet size: 0KB. Zero? ZERO? Come on, now you’re just making stuff up.
Metrics – average disk queue length. Awesome – leading with the single least useful disk counter. Modern DBAs know that you measure latency, not queue lengths.
And don’t even get me started on the colored lines – I’m red-green colorblind.
With that one screen shot, I simply gave up looking at the product. It might rock, and I look forward to hearing real-life user stories, but in thirty seconds, that one screen shot told me it’s not ready for a real evaluation yet. I don’t like publicly pooping on a product, but this one screen shot is spectacularly bad.
ApexSQL, you can do better.