If you aren’t familiar with our Cloud offering, it’s where you can sync your performance data from your on-premises systems up to the SQL Sentry Cloud so that you can share the information with partners, co-workers, or consultants – without giving them direct access to the SQL Sentry Client or your repository. The SQL Sentry Cloud also includes our Server Health Status view, which provides a great high-level view of the health of your entire environment. It’s a great companion tool for SQL Sentry Performance Advisor.
Earlier in the year, we quietly released a new feature for our SQL Sentry Cloud Offering: Report Subscriptions. For quite some time now, you could generate reports from the cloud interface; however, now you can create subscription for reports that schedule them to be delivered.
With this feature you can now schedule to receive a report on your top resource intensive queries every week, or maybe you want to get a daily report on file growth. If you are using our version 10.0 or higher on premises, then it’s as simple as providing a schedule, who to e-mail, and any required parameters to get reports delivered to inboxes.
Creating a New Report Subscription
It’s easy to create a new report subscription. First, log in to your cloud.SQLSentry.com account and navigate to the Server Details for the repository you wish to configure reports for. From the top navigation menu select reports. When the reports screen loads you’ll notice two new icons next to each report name.
I’ll cover the other one later, but if you click the icon of a report with an e-mail in the upper right hand corner next to the report you wish to subscribe to, it will load up a screen which lets you provide any parameters the report may need, as well as where you want to send the report.
Currently you can choose from a daily, weekday, weekly or monthly schedule. These are defined as:
- Daily – Every day at the scheduled start time (NOTE: The time to execute the report is in UTC).
- Weekday – Monday thru Friday as the scheduled start time, providing the last 24 hours of data.
- Weekly – Every Monday at the scheduled start time, providing the previous weeks’ worth of data (Sunday thru Saturday).
- Monthly – On the 1st of the month, containing the previous months’ worth of data.
You indicate who to e-mail to the report to, as well as provide your own subject and any information you want to include in the body of the message the report will be attached to. The feature supports producing reports in PDF, CSV, MHTML, XML, Word and Excel. Note that the start time you provide is in UTC, so you’ll want to think about how that time might be different from all the recipients on the subscription.
You can still simply run the report on demand by clicking on the report name in the report list and providing any required parameters.
Managing Report Subscriptions
Currently when you create a report subscription, you are the owner of that subscription and only you can modify or remove it. When the report is emailed out your email is provided as the “Reply-to” address even though it will look like the report is coming from us.
That way if recipients of the email have questions when they click reply it will come back to you rather than being sent in to SQL Sentry. If you have any questions or issues with the feature reach out to use at support@geeksforgeeks.org and we’ll be glad to help!
Once you have created one or more subscriptions you can manage them in the new vertical tab you see on the left of the report screen labeled “Subscriptions”. From that tab you’ll see a list of all of your subscriptions for that repository. You can select one to modify it, or delete one.
You’ll also notice that subscriptions can be enabled (which is the default when you create them), or disabled. The Subscriptions list will show a small green bar next to any of your active subscriptions so it is easy to see the currently enabled subscriptions.
Bonus
Remember that second new icon I mentioned in the report list? This isn’t related to the report subscriptions, but we now have a new “pop-out” button which will open a new browser window with the selected report in that window. Now you can spin off a window to run your reports so you can have multiple up at once if you’d like.
Try it out!
If you are already using the Cloud offering we hope you give the new report subscriptions a try! If you haven’t tried the SQL Sentry Cloud out yet, this may give you a reason to give start looking into it.
You can find out more by checking out the Cloud product page and reading the documentation on how to set up your cloud sync. As always, if you have any questions or feedback please don’t hesitate to share it with us through support@geeksforgeeks.org.
