Performance Improvements in SQL Server Dashboards Management Pack

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We recently released new Community Technology Preview bits for SQL Server Dashboards MP as well as other SQL product family MPs. You can find the CTP2 blog post with a link to the download page here.

There are a number of improvements in the new version and one of the improvements is performance gains in dashboard display times. We made a demo video that demonstrates the performance gains. It also goes over some new features quickly. In the video you will see:

  • Performance gains in initial dashboard load and drill down scenarios. We also use a deferred load method that lets the user see the tiles as they get populated instead of waiting for the whole dashboard to be ready before seeing anything.
  • The example used in the demo uses 12K objects which should give you a good idea as to how the performance gains will apply to your environment. We tested up to 1,000,000 objects in our test environment and observed huge performance improvements.
  • There are also some new UI features that are demonstrated such as:
    • Virtual groups – You don’t need to create a SCOM group to display aggregated data for a class of objects (e.g., all your 2014 SQL Server instances).
    • Bulk add tile – You can create your dashboard quickly and customize.
    • Enabling states – You can decide which states you want tracked in tiles.
    • SQL Instance Path property – You can identify instances when they are named the same (e.g., default MSSQLSERVER) by looking at their path property right underneath the instance name. You can also filter by path property.

We would love to hear your feedback on the CTP2 release. Please email us at SQLMPsFeedback at microsoft.com with your feedback.