SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard Reports -- Now Available!

Have you ever noticed one of your SQL Server instances running unusually slowly?

Have you had difficulty quickly identifying what areas could be affecting its performance?

One of our customer support Escalation Engineers, Keith Elmore, specializes in understanding these types of problems.  He has worked with customers all over the world on diagnosing their toughest and most critical performance bottlenecks.  Keith has put together a set of Reporting Services reports that will help DBAs diagnose potential performance problems.  These reports were designed to leverage the new Custom Reports functionality in SQL Server Management Studio (Service Pack 2).

The SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard Reports only use Dynamic Management Views and Catalog Views.  They do not poll performance counters from the OS, nor do they store a history of your server's performance over time.  These are very light-weight reports that will help diagnose performance problems as they are occurring.

I encourage you to check them out.  Feel free to comment here with your thoughts and questions.

SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard Reports:
https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1D3A4A0D-7E0C-4730-8204-E419218C1EFC&displaylang=en

Paul A. Mestemaker II
Program Manager
Microsoft SQL Server Manageability

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 07, 2007
  PingBack from http://mostgrandadventure.wordpress.com/2007/03/08/those-ever-productive-folks-at-ms/

• Anonymous
  March 07, 2007
  Keith Elmore, an escalation engineer at Microsoft, has created a "Performance Dashboard" for SQL Server...

• Anonymous
  March 08, 2007
  Excellent job .. it's very useful for look where is the problem.  One feature that i suggest is if you can indicate the T-SQL that have table scans or index scans in a dashboards, its a good information when have performance problems.

• Anonymous
  March 15, 2007
  Great report I wish MS releases more of these for free I like the "Missing Index" best thus far but the word "Dashboard" just turns me on :P or Business Scorecard

• Anonymous
  March 28, 2007
  This is awesome stuff!!!

• Anonymous
  April 02, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 02, 2007
  The dashboard was working splendid until this morning with the following error: Difference of two datetime columns caused overflow at runtime. Have reloaded the msi package (local server/client) and deleted sp's/functions and re-ran setup.sql script on remote server with the same results. Any suggestions appreciated..

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 05, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 05, 2007
  I have run the setup.sql script and then the performance_dashboard_main.rdl. I am getting errors when I try to run most the reports. Errors are: --"The 'version_string' jparameter is missing a value" --"The "Report parameter 'sql_handle' was not found" --"Report parameter 'include_system_processes' was not found" Any help available on this?

• Anonymous
  May 09, 2007
  David; thanks for the fix.  very helpful! cori

• Anonymous
  May 11, 2007
  Did i do it thr right way....!!!!!????? serever management......?????

• Anonymous
  May 11, 2007
  I am getting "The 'version_string' parameter is missing a value" when running the database_overview.rdl Does anyone have a fix for this problem?  H-E-L-P!!

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2007
  Thanks. Good work. Naras

• Anonymous
  May 23, 2007
  Hello, i have a problem when i click on any  blue region in the chart for the SQL CPU utilization on the performance dashboard where you normally would get further infos (reports for the last 15 minutes). There comes no repport but an Error: Arithmetic overflow error conferting expression to data type datetime. This happens on two different servers with SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Editions, but all other driil through is functioning. What' s the problem, is it a problem in recent_cpu.rdl or performance_dashboard_main.rdl or in the called stored procedures. Please help, it is a really good tool, but not good when functioning only partly. Thanks for help Heinrich

• Anonymous
  May 29, 2007
  I also have problem when I click on the blue region for the CPU (CPU System Utilization), and it happens on only one server, other servers works fine Following error

An error has occurred during report processing. Cannot read the next data row for the data set SESSION_REQUEST_ACTIVITY. For more information about this error navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors

Any ideas how to fix it? Lars

• Anonymous
  May 29, 2007
  Hi, I am facing an error saying ‘Arithmetic overflow error converting expression to data type datetime.’ In data base due to my following query. Then I tried with cast and convert function too, still I got the error. select   *  from datetable where  cast(('May 29 2007  6:30:00:000PM' - endtime) as int) >=2 and  cast(('May 29 2007  6:30:00:000PM' - endtime)  as int)<=3 and  datetable_id  = 102 order by datetable_id  desc I got this beacause of some bad ‘endtime’ data in datetable for datetable_id   102 : 5465-08-12 12:00:00.000. But I need to support all type of date here and the table is also huge. So I have this col as indexed. I thought of to use datediff func here. again I am not sure what will be the performance impact on my query, coz it will diff and convert to int and compare for each of the row. So can any body suggest how efficiently can i handle this? Thanks ~DKRoul

• Anonymous
  June 11, 2007
  Hello, as i have wrote before (May 23, 2007) i wasn't able to use the Performance Dashboard because of the described  failure. A week later the report functions without changing something. It works fine for some days until 08. June 07, then in the morning i want to look again in the chart for SQL CPU utilization and nothing functions again, but now i get the failure as described from other users, that is: Difference of two datetime columns caused overflow at runtime. I have implemented the fix as described by David, but it doesn't help, i think there must be more bugs in the programming with datetime-conversion etc. Now again, i am not able to use this fantastic tool. Does anyone have a fix for this problem? Please help.

• Anonymous
  June 13, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  June 18, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 24, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  July 28, 2007
  I'm getting the parameter issues mentioned by Ron above.  Any help?

• Anonymous
  July 28, 2007
  Nevermind.   Duh...should have read directions.  For others...open through the performance_dashboard_main.rdl which supplies params.

• Anonymous
  August 09, 2007
  The datetime value is days - fractional part is time.  86400000 = 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000 converts days to ms.  This should should avoid overflow here and in most cases.  I have not tried extreme dates - perhaps the difference won't be in the range of a valid datetime?   CAST(FLOOR(86400000 * CAST(getdate() - login_time as float)) as bigint) -- ms

• Anonymous
  August 13, 2007
  Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard Reports предназначен для контроля и получения необходимой

• Anonymous
  August 21, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  August 27, 2007
  I'm getting the "Difference of two datetime columns caused overflow at runtime" error when trying to drill down into the Blue SQL Server CPU usage on the main dashboard screen.  I understand the problem with uptime (server has been up for more than 24 days), datediff, and ms but I'm having some problems tracking down where the change from ms to ss needs to be made for this drill down functionality to work again.  I tried a profiler trace, but the only procedure I see executing is the usp_CheckDependencies.  After that I just see a bunch of execute_sql statements. Any help would be appreciated

• Anonymous
  September 07, 2007
  Any idea if there are any issues while converting from timestamp to big int???

• Anonymous
  September 11, 2007
  Hi, I do where the following change in the datetime difference should be made: CAST(FLOOR(86400000 * CAST(getdate() - login_time as float)) as bigint) -- ms I get the error now on any SQL Server environment where connections have been online for more than a month. Can someone please help me.  Or can you let me know when the Performance Dashboard will be updated? Shahryar

• Anonymous
  October 23, 2007
  Regarding the "The 'version_string' parameter is missing a value" when running the database_overview.rdl" error. A quick and dirty fix is to delete all references to version_string in database_overview.rdl. Version_string (1.0) is the version of DashboardReports functionality. Not really useful to have it there anyway...

• Anonymous
  November 20, 2007
  Hi, I have posted 3 times indicating the error with datetime difference but no one seems to have an answer.  Is this product even supported by Microsoft?  Will there be an update or basically we have it as is until SQL 2008 is out? I would really like to know. Shahryar

• Anonymous
  November 21, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  December 04, 2007
  Great! The fix works perfect on "Difference of two datetime columns caused overflow at runtime" error.

• Anonymous
  December 06, 2007
  Hello, i have the same problem that Heinrich posted on May 16, "when i click on any  blue region in the chart for the SQL CPU utilization on the performance dashboard where you normally would get further infos (reports for the last 15 minutes). There comes no repport but an Error: Arithmetic overflow error conferting expression to data type datetime. This happens on two different servers with SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Editions, but all other driil through is functioning. What' s the problem, is it a problem in recent_cpu.rdl or performance_dashboard_main.rdl or in the called stored procedures. Please help, it is a really good tool, but not good when functioning only partly." Thanks for help

• Anonymous
  January 02, 2008
  Has anyone found a fix for this particualr error: An error has occurred during report processing. Cannot read the next data row for the data set SESSION_REQUEST_ACTIVITY. For more information about this error navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors I applied the fix for the conversion issue, worked great....but still would like to get this other one knocked out. Thanks!!

• Anonymous
  January 02, 2008
  Did anyone ever find a solution to this issue: An error has occurred during report processing. Cannot read the next data row for the data set SESSION_REQUEST_ACTIVITY. For more information about this error navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors It's a different query altogether from the fix that was listed. Thanks!

• Anonymous
  January 06, 2008
  Thank you for an exellent tool! Does anyone know if its possible to exclude replication queries from the report? Thanx Jørn Nystad

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2008
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2008
  ...potreste avere un errore nella visualizzazione dei report della Performance Dashboard. Questo è dovuto

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2008
  Great solution David. Microsoft needs to hire some people like you.

• Anonymous
  March 03, 2008
  I have posted this question to about a dozen different boards and have not received any response...does Microsoft even support this thing or read the posts people put out there?!? I originally got the conversion error. I applied the fix that was mentioned. Things worked fine. I am nor getting this: An error has occurred during report processing. Cannot read the next data row for the data set SESSION_REQUEST_ACTIVITY. Difference of two datetime columns caused overflow at runtime. Does ANYONE know what this is and where I can go to fix it???

• Anonymous
  April 13, 2008
  I would like to let some of my developers see the dashboard.  I ahve not given them SA  rights.  When they try to view the rep[orts they get 'Error  you do not have permission to run sys.traces . My question is how do I grant them permissions to the sys. schema without granting SA rights?

• Anonymous
  April 28, 2008
  The main report has a table for user requests and user sessions?  What are the threshold figures for the items in this table? The expensive queries section of the screenshot has several links.  Are the stats collected for queries ran on a db where the sql code is in the programming language and not in TSQL?

• Anonymous
  July 02, 2008
  It would be nice if the fixes to the setup.sql and to the recent_cpu.rdl were rolled-up into a new download msi. Or will these be fixed when SQL 2005 SP3 is released!?

• Anonymous
  April 05, 2009
  Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Performance Dashboard Reports предназначен для контроля и получения необходимой

• Anonymous
  July 07, 2010
  I have same error after click on Blue part of System CPU Utilization graph on dash board. Please help as I have used given suggestion here and it didn't worked. Thanks in Advance.

• Anonymous
  July 07, 2010
  I have same error after click on Blue part of System CPU Utilization graph on dash board. Please help as I have used given suggestion here and it didn't worked. Thanks in Advance.

• Anonymous
  February 25, 2011
  Thank you David for the fix - also helped my problem.

• Anonymous
  June 08, 2011
  These reports immediately gave me a datetime error, as others have described.  A pity MS have not fixed the bug even all these years later.