So You Want to Watch Your SQL Server, Huh?
Right. Because staring at blinking lights in PerfMon wasn’t painful enough. This article – and I use that term loosely – details how to hook up Grafana to your SQL Server instance for “real-time” monitoring. Don’t get your hopes up; it’s not *actually* real-time, just frequently updated graphs.
Basically, you need to install the Telegraf agent (more crap to manage, naturally), configure it with a bunch of plugins to pull metrics from SQL Server using either T-SQL or Extended Events. Extended Events are preferred because… reasons. Then you shove that data into InfluxDB (another database? Seriously?), and then Grafana can visualize it.
They walk you through setting up a dashboard with the usual suspects: CPU usage, memory, disk I/O, query stats, deadlocks – all the things you should already be looking at if you weren’t wasting time trying to build your own monitoring system. There’s even some talk about using Loki for logs, because apparently one database wasn’t enough.
The whole thing is a massive overcomplication of what SQL Server Management Studio and basic alerting can already do. But hey, if you enjoy needless complexity and spending your life configuring agents and databases just to see pretty graphs, knock yourself out. Don’t come crying to me when it breaks.
Oh, and they mention using a reverse proxy (nginx) for secure access. Because exposing Grafana directly is *obviously* a good idea. Idiots.
Related Anecdote: I once had a sysadmin spend three days building a custom monitoring solution with Nagios, only to discover that SQL Server’s built-in alerts could have done the same thing in five minutes. Five. Minutes. He then proceeded to complain about how “Nagios is better” while simultaneously fixing its constant false positives. Some people just *need* to suffer.
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