Is It SQL - 1.0.28 now with better AG backups

It's finally time to push another release of Is It SQL out the door. This has a few big features I've been working on.

Backups

First, it handles remote Availability Group backups properly. In an AG, you can run a backup on a secondary node. IsItSQL now finds backups on any node and shows them on all nodes.

My backup of AdventureWorks2014 from December 2016 now shows when it was backed up, the backup file name and the instance that completed the backup. And it will show that on any AG node that hosts that database.

Dashboards

The dashboard page was the one feature I was really excited about when I first built the software. But it's become a page I rarely use. This latest build allows you to choose which servers appear on the dashboard by assigning the "dashboard" tag. It will display the first three servers with that tag on the dashboard sorted by the Friendly Name.

Availability Group Failovers

The last big feature handles aliases that change where they point. This is often a listener for an availability group. At one client, every production server has a static DNS that is used by applications. In some cases, individual databases also have a static DNS entry. This allows us to easily move to new servers or domains.

In SQL Server, waits and disk I/O are tracked in aggregate. The value I show in the graph is the value reported less what it was a minute ago. Which works fine until an AG fails over or we repoint our static DNS to the other replication subscriber. I always handled negative changes but not super huge positive changes.

Now it checks for a change in the underlying server for for a server restart. If either one of those changes, we put a message in the log and reset the counters.

You can download Is It SQL from the scaleSQL site.

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