Activity Monitor gets new life

Live Query Statistics (LQS) has a viable use case, as we discussed in the Using Live Query Statistics section of this chapter: a previously identified long-running query. But what if we haven’t identified an offending query yet? What if we are the database professional that got that middle-of-the-night call asking us to solve an issue with a business-critical ETL process that runs every night, but is unusually slow today?

Note

ETL is an acronym for Extract-Transform-Load, which is the name given to a process that extracts data from a data source, enacts transformations in that data such as aggregations or calculations, and loads the result into a destination such as a database. A typical example of an ETL process is a SQL Server Agent job that schedules the execution of a SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) package.

That is where Activity Monitor (AM) comes in. AM is an SSMS feature that’s been there for a long time and has probably...