Question :
We have a quarterly metric meeting and I report the metrics for all of our production SQL Servers. The people that are looking at these reports are mostly management (some technical, but others are not so much) and want to see a nice overall picture of the performance of the SQL Servers, but I really don’t want to give the generic metrics of CPU, number of db, disk space usage, etc.
Currently, I have some numbers like average batches per database, restore time for databases and I do have the number of databases (even though I said I really didn’t want that one).
Any suggestions on other metrics that may be interesting to show managment that would be easy for them to understand and actually show the health of the SQL Servers?
Answer :
If as you say your management don’t give you clear directions, I think it gives you an opportunity to be proactive and show them you’re worth more than they’re currently paying you. Listen to other people reporting their metrics and figure out what management feels is important from the business perspective.
“X batches per second”? Meh. “My databases can support up to x online orders per second with current hardware; this meets our peak workload of y orders per second on Black Friday”. Sounds useful.
“Backup status”? Meh. “If hardware fails, we’ll be able to be back online in Z minutes”. Sounds useful.