VISUAL SCHEDULING
No more trying to use "Next Run Date" to divine a server's job schedule! sqlSentry's Outlook-style calendar view provides a clear picture of your SQL Server and Windows schedules -- giving you unprecedented visibility and control over scheduling issues that can impact server performance.



The sqlSentry calendar highlights schedule overlap and contention issues, long running events, failed events and more using clear visual indicators. Quickly view historical and future schedule information at a glance, and easily resolve conflicts using drag-and-drop.

MORE THAN JUST SQL AGENT JOBS
Just as SQL Agent jobs can impact SQL Server performance, so can, for example, a Windows Task running a disk defragmentation.  As a DBA, you need to know about those events too since they're using the same CPU, RAM, and disk resources as SQL Server.  sqlSentry automatically brings all of these events together and displays them on its unified calendar, so you get the whole picture... not just part of it.

SHARED RESOURCE CALENDARS
You can easily create calendars showing all jobs or tasks that read or write to a particular SAN or NAS device, or that utilize a certain network segment, for the purpose of leveling the scheduled activity across the resource and thereby reducing contention.

EVENT HISTORY VIEW
If you've spent any time at all inside the tiny job history window in Enterprise Manager, or Task Scheduler's rolling text file log, you will greatly appreciate sqlSentry's unified Event History viewer.  It provides flexible sorting and grouping capabilities, color-coded status indicators, and includes integrated maintenance plan output.

MULTI-SERVER FEATURES
sqlSentry fully supports the multi-server job administration capabilities of SQL Server.  Multi-server calendars on Master (MSX) servers enable you to see what's happening across all Target (TSX) servers in one view!  The multi-server job history viewer allows you to easily filter by specific Target servers, or view activity across all Target servers together.

CHAINING and QUEUING
Advanced scheduling features such as job queuing and chaining can help ensure that schedule conflicts and resource contention are prevented, even when runtimes fall outside of the norm.



OPTIMIZE SQL SERVER PERFORMANCE
SQL Server scheduling issues are often one of the biggest "hidden" contributors to performance degradation, and a lack of reliable notifications via SQL Mail & MAPI only compounds the issue. sqlSentry provides all of the tools a DBA needs to efficiently manage complex job schedules in order to minimize schedule contention, resource battles and other performance problems caused by "unoptimized" schedules. Plus it will reliably alert you when there are issues requiring attention.

MONITOR SCHEDULE PERFORMANCE
sqlSentry makes it simple to link any Windows performance counter directly to any job, task, or report and see exactly what impact it's having on performance throughout its run lifetime. sqlSentry automatically enables and disables counters as needed, minimizing server and network overhead.

You can easily link performance counters from different servers to a job, which can be extremely valuable for troubleshooting jobs that do work on multiple servers such as for replication, log shipping, DTS, etc.

RUNTIME THRESHOLDS
Never again get burned when SQL Agent hangs and a job runs for 5 days instead of 5 minutes, and you're never alerted. sqlSentry continuously monitors job and task runtimes and generates alerts based on defined minimum or maximum runtime thresholds, which can be set at the global, server, or job-level. You can easily be alerted whenever any job, task, report, or DTS package in your enterprise runs above or below a certain percentage of its "average" runtime, as well as an explicit threshold such as "1 hour".

BLOCK DETECTION
sqlSentry detects whenever a job is involved in a blocking condition (blocked or blocking), and alerts you with the full SQL statements, host names, and application names in the blocking chain.

ADVANCED NOTIFICATIONS
sqlSentry employs the most comprehensive and reliable notification system available today for SQL Server, providing a wide variety of response actions to any job status, runtime or performance condition. Its centralized management eliminates the need to touch each server. Full alerting features are also provided for Windows Task Scheduler, Reporting Services, and other event sources outside of SQL Server. sqlSentry's powerful notifications are available for both 32 and 64-bit versions of SQL Server.

MAPI-FREE ALERTING!
sqlSentry enables you to eliminate SQL Mail and Database Mail across your enterprise instantly, without agents! sqlSentry takes control of the notification function for all job and server alerts, and includes an interface-compatible replacement for xp_sendmail. The sqlSentry notification system is agent-less, fault-tolerant and has no dependencies on SQL Mail or MAPI.

CONDITIONS and ACTIONS
sqlSentry can generate email or pager alerts, and take various other actions using event status, runtime, or performance information.

ALERT MESSAGES
sqlSentry goes beyond the limited alerting capabilities of SQL Server Agent with messages that include granular, detail-level information. sqlSentry alerts contain more of the information you need to quickly evaluate and resolve any job condition, which can dramatically reduce response times.



EVENT CHAINING
sqlSentry's advanced chaining features enable you to quickly and easily define dependencies and workflows involving SQL Agent jobs and/or Windows Tasks. You have ultimate flexibility with regard to how the chains are defined - the chained jobs or tasks can reside anywhere in the enterprise, and you can have unlimited levels per chain, as well as unlimited jobs/tasks per level.



THE "EXECUTE JOB" ACTION
For simpler 1-to-1 chaining scenarios, you can utilize the "Execute Job" action to trigger a job on any SQL Server in response to any other event status or performance condition, for any event type.

JOB QUEUING
sqlSentry's advanced queuing features make it easy to prevent job conflicts related to occasional runtime deviations, and enforce inter-job dependencies. You can set a job to queue or be queued for a specified time, limit the total number of jobs in the queue at any one time, and control a job's behavior when it pops off the queue.

PERFORMANCE GRAPHS
Event performance graphs clearly illustrate how schedule collisions may be impacting server and database performance. Any Windows performance counters, including any SQL Server counters, can easily be "linked" to a SQL Agent job, Windows task or Reporting Services report, and performance data will be automatically collected whenever the scheduled event runs. Combination Gantt / Bar graphs are used to visually correlate schedule activity and performance data in an easy to read format.



RUNTIME GRAPHS
Event runtime graphs provide both historical and aggregate views, making it easy to spot runtime trends that can be an indicator of underlying scheduling and/or resource contention issues. For example, you can see how your nightly backups are trending over the past 3 months to determine if and when they'll fall outside of your desired backup window.

CONFLICTS VIEWER
The conflicts viewer shows all scheduled events on a server with overlapping runtimes, sorted descending by ?Total Conflict Time? by default (the total time one event overlaps with all other events). This measure is extremely valuable in determining which events may be causing the most resource contention. You simply double-click any conflict instance to immediately jump to that spot on the calendar, then quickly resolve the conflict using drag-and-drop.

SQL SERVER 2005 SUPPORT
sqlSentry provides our complete visual schedule management and notification features for SQL Server 2005. While SQL Server 2005 is a major advance in many areas, it does not offer much more than SQL Server 2000 in terms of new features for managing scheduled events and notifications. One big change with SQL Server 2005 is that users can create "shared schedules," which actually increases the likelihood of scheduling collisions. This is an issue sqlSentry handles by highlighting the collisions on the calendar and allowing the DBA to resolve them via a quick drag-and-drop.