14 DAY TRIAL // Customers leveraging Microsoft’s Cloud technologies can turn to a tool provided by the company in order to diagnose SQL Server issues. The Microsoft CSS SQL Azure Diagnostics has been available for quite a while now, and can be downloaded free of charge via this link.
Developed by Microsoft Customer Service and Support (CSS) SQL Support, the tool enables customers to help customers troubleshoot SQL Azure issues, by expediting the data collection process.
“Since you cannot use PSSDiag/SQLDiag against SQL Azure, I decided to develop this tool to shorten the data collection process when troubleshooting SQL Azure issues,” revealed Evan Basalik, from the CSS SQL Server team.
“You can point CSAD to your SQL Azure instance, provide the appropriate credentials and will then be presented with some good summary data about your instance. Since I leverage the standard ReportViewer control, you can also export the reports to a number of different formats.
“This makes it easy to share the reports with either your colleagues or CSS. In addition, CSAD is a Click-Once application, so it has a very light installation and it always checks for the latest version.”
Everything about the tool has been developed with extreme simplicity in mind. Customers will be required to install ReportViewer 2010 and the .NET 4.0 Client Profile before CSS SQL Azure Diagnostics, but that’s about it.
The tool is also quite simple to use as customers will discover, being required to click just a single button after providing the necessary credentials.
Basalik has a comprehensive presentation of the CSS SQL Azure Diagnostics on the official blog of the CSS SQL Server team. It’s certainly an interesting read, especially for customers interested in leveraging the tool in order to deal with any problems affecting Microsoft’s Cloud flavor of its data platform.
The Microsoft CSS SQL Azure Diagnostics tool is available for download here.