Download

• Database Health Monitor
• FAQ
• Pricing
• Testimonials
• Download
• Buy

The first tool you reach for when SQL Server is slow

Database Health Monitor finds the slow queries, missing indexes, and blocking behind performance problems fast. Try it free for 30 days on your own server. No credit card.

Thank you for using Database Health Monitor.

---

What People Are Saying About Database Health Monitor

• “I installed Database Health Monitor on many of my client’s SQL servers and believe it’s the best tool out there for SQL monitoring.” – Charles Ray – March 2022
• This is a great application for SQL Server DBAing. We have a web based product but this one is so comprehensive, both high level and detailed. So much is available right at the click of a button, it is amazing! I am so grateful for the application, for the effort to build it, and the decision to share it. I know it has made me a better DBA, my organization has benefited from it, and I deeply appreciate all of that! Thank you! – Jesse – October 2021
• Thank you a lot for this excellent application. I loved the “missing indexes” and “Statistics” section, it helps me to save time and effort for the weekly maintenance.
  Best Regards  November 2019
• Database Health is the first tool that I pull up when someone calls and complains about slow performance in their applications, that be Dynamics NAV, Dynamics AX or even the webpages running slow. It saves me a lot of time finding the queries, missing indexes or what be it, causing the problem. This is by far the easiest and most effective tool to use, when searching for problems that need instant resolution. Thanx a million for your contribution to the SQL world.  September 2019.
• This is an awesome tool to find issues and fix them or improve performance in areas that I didn’t even know we can.
• I would like to thank you for sharing this product with us free. I have installed and using health monitor on my production DB.  very very nice…. Thank you so very much. I hope you will keep adding more features in this product. Well done  (Rohit)
• Outstanding app. Already referred it to several friends in the field. Well I do have to say the changes you have made (regarding version 2.5), seems to have made everything in the interface much snappier. Your work here is quite impressive. (Frank from Texas)
• Outstanding! Besides enjoying the layout of your app, one thing I really like about the Quick Scan Report is each entry has a corresponding link that discusses the finding so I can go back and review recommendations, cautions, etc. (Michael)

November 2026 Release – Version 4.1869 Release

Your own history, put to work: 33 new reports that read the monitoring history database to answer what changed, who did it, when it started and when the disk fills, high availability and Agent job history that outlives msdb, printing and PDF for every page, a much bigger Dashboards tile catalog, and 973 fixes.

• 33 New reports
• 11 New features
• 973 Bug fixes

New reports

33 items. The theme this release is making the history database earn its keep. Most of these reports read the monitoring history that the collector has been saving, so they answer questions a live DMV never can: how a database behaved over weeks, which statement or login changed the picture, and what is about to run out. Reports that need history show where history begins and where the collector was not running. Instance reports run from the instance node and Database reports from a database node.

Collection health and coverage

• Monitoring Coverage (Instance report): Shows which collectors ran, the gaps in each history table, collector errors and how the data resolution drops with age, so you know whether the history you are about to trust is complete.
• CHECKDB Cadence (Instance report): How often each database really got a clean CHECKDB, the longest unchecked stretch and every miss, built from history rather than from the last run date alone.
• Estate Health Scorecard (Instance report): Every monitored instance side by side, week by week, for CPU, waits, page life expectancy, connections and blocking, so the instance that is drifting stands out.
• Monthly Health Summary (Instance report): One printable page per instance per month covering uptime, backups, CHECKDB, growth and peaks, written to be handed to a manager or an auditor.

Waits, blocking and workload

• Blocking Culprits (Instance report): The head blockers behind 30 days of blocking, ranked by the number of sessions and the seconds they held up.
• Wait Profile Shift by Query (Instance report): Statements whose dominant wait changed week over week, such as CPU to disk or disk to locks, each with what the change usually means.
• Wait Anomaly Calendar (Instance report): Every hour of a database’s waits compared with its own normal for that hour of the week, over 30, 60 or 90 days, so you do not have to know when to look.
• Noisy Neighbor Databases (Instance report): Each database’s share of the instance waits by day, and which database’s spikes line up with slowdowns in the others.
• Long Running Query Trends (Database report): Recurring long runners grouped by query hash, which are getting slower, when they start, and whether they are working or waiting.
• New and Vanished Queries (Database report): Statements first seen recently, statements that stopped appearing, and what each costs in waits, a quick way to spot the effect of a deployment.
• Memory Grant Waits History (Instance report): When queries queued for workspace memory, for how long, which statements and how often.
• Connection Leak Detector (Instance report): Session counts that climb between restarts without any increase in work, and the applications behind them.

Memory, storage and capacity

• Buffer Pool Share Over Time (Instance report): Each database’s memory residency by hour, who grew, who got pushed out, and when.
• PLE Drop Forensics (Instance report): Every page life expectancy collapse with the queries, reads and memory events around it.
• Storage Saturation Curve (Instance report): Disk latency plotted against I/O load for each drive, so you can tell whether the workload or the storage is the problem.
• File Latency Trend (Database report): Read and write latency for each database file by day for 90 days, with the regressions flagged.
• Autogrowth and Shrink Events (Instance report): Every file growth and shrink from the size history, tiny growth storms and shrink then grow loops.
• Log Growth and Log Backups (Database report): Log file growth lined up with late log backups, open transactions and big jobs.
• Database Space Runway (Database report): Free space inside the data files from table growth, the next autogrowth and the date the drive fills.
• CPU Capacity Forecast (Instance report): The peak hour CPU trend by month and the projected date the busiest hour reaches the limit.
• TempDB Consumer Trends (Instance report): The recurring tempdb users over weeks, by statement and login, and the drivers of version store growth.
• Restart Recovery Profile (Instance report): After each restart or failover, how long page life expectancy, CPU, compiles and waits took to settle back to normal.

Tables, indexes and data

• Index Adoption and Abandonment (Database report): New indexes and whether they ever got used, and indexes that were used and then stopped.
• Cold Data Finder (Database report): Large tables that are rarely read, sized against their activity, as archive and compression candidates.
• Table Shrink and Purge Watch (Database report): Tables that lose rows, purge jobs that stopped, sudden drops and space that was never given back.
• Database Activity Calendar (Instance report): Every database’s days of reads, writes and sessions from history, with the idle databases named.
• Schema Change Analytics (Instance report): Who changes what, deployments found in the DDL log, out of hours changes and their impact.

People, logins and Agent jobs

• Who Uses This Database (Database report): The logins, hosts and programs seen over time, newcomers, ones that have gone quiet and the days each was active.
• Dormant Logins and Applications (Instance report): Logins, hosts and programs not seen working for months, as cleanup candidates.
• Agent Job Resource Cost (Instance report): CPU, reads and writes for each SQL Agent job per run and per day, trending, and what each job overlaps with.
• Job Duration Trends (Instance report): Each Agent job’s run durations over time with the runs that took longer than usual picked out. It reads the job history this release now keeps beyond the msdb retention.
• Job Timeline (Instance report): A cross server Gantt style timeline of Agent job runs, so overlapping jobs and the long ones are visible at a glance.

High availability

• HA/DR History (Instance report): Availability Group data loss (RPO) and recovery time (RTO) samples, failovers, log shipping latency and replication latency, drawn over time with the events marked. The Availability Groups, Log Shipping and Replication reports link to it.

New features

11 items. The theme this release is putting the estate on paper and on the wall: a bigger Dashboards tile catalog that stays fast with many servers, printing and PDF from every page, and history that keeps more of what msdb throws away.

Dashboards

• More live and history report tiles. Another 15 instance reports get a tile that shows the report’s own headline instead of a link: Connections Over Time (hour of day profile of peak connections), Memory Grants and Spills (queued, granted, used, timeouts and forced grants), Deadlocks By Hour and Long Running by Hour (week by hour heat grids), Deadlocks by Database, Deadlock Objects, TempDB Metadata Contention, Email Alert Log, What Changed (the logins behind schema changes), Memory Pressure (low memory events on a timeline), Chargeback (CPU by database), Backup SLA (in violation, within grace, OK and unknown), Linked Servers, Session Waits and Host Hardware.
• Database page tiles. A new tile family for the pages under a database, driven by the Database variable in the board header: Database Overview, Files, Backup Size, Backup Time Frames, Recovery Exposure, VLFs, Table Size, Unused Indexes, Missing Indexes, Index Fragmentation (with a Scan now button), Statistics, File Size Over Time, Query Store Health and Untrusted Constraints. Each uses the same bands and verdicts as the page it summarizes.
• Sizing, shapes and readability. Report tiles take a default size from their shape and category boards pack them by shape and importance. One big number size rule (small, medium, large) is shared by KPI, report, gauge and stat strip tiles with the state arrow on all of them. A tile skips the caption that only repeats its title, healthy items are drawn green like the status list, color blind mode is honored, and heat tiles get unique day labels, regional hour labels, a scale legend and a cell tooltip.
• Click through and keyboard. Report tile items show a tooltip with the full name and value, a click opens the report on that item and on that database, and the arrow keys walk the items.
• Menus and sharing. The 33 item Board menu is split into Board and View menus with Board settings as the one home for every option. A built in board offers Customize, which copies it and opens the copy in Edit mode in one step. Add to dashboard on reports and Server Overview cards places the matching tile on a board you choose. The tile right click menu has one layout in view and Edit mode with a Copy submenu and Lock. Copy link on a published board opens that shared board for a teammate with its range, server and variables. The page reopens the last board viewed and a first visit shows a one time welcome strip. Dialogs fit a 1366 by 768 laptop at 150 percent display scale.
• Built for many servers. Refreshes cancel superseded and abandoned queries, pause while minimized and load off screen tiles as you scroll. Live tiles read all of a board’s live metrics in one pooled, named connection per server per poll, estate tiles scale to 50 or more servers without thread pool starvation or false did not answer rows, and compare tiles can no longer hang a shared history database. Event metrics such as blocking, deadlocks and errors count a quiet period as zero, and metrics with no instance column say so on a shared history database. The built in Estate boards cover the estate, the Production board uses production servers and Storage leads with drives.

Printing and PDF

• Print This Page and Save This Page as PDF. Ctrl+P prints the page you are looking at and Ctrl+Shift+P saves it as a PDF, with Print Options on the Database menu. Pages that know better supply their own printout, a historic time window is written into the header, and HTML pages print through the browser. Printouts are drawn in light colors on white whatever the screen theme, and the print preview and PDF progress window carry the Database Health Monitor icon.
• Print Grid and Print Chart. Every grid menu gains Print Grid and Save Grid as PDF, and every chart menu gains Print Chart and Save Chart as PDF. Headings, text, pictures and tables flow across pages, the Dashboards page prints a board through the same shared print shell, and a new help page, Printing and Saving as PDF, explains it all.

History and alerting

• High availability history and alerts. The collector now samples Availability Group RPO and RTO, failovers, log shipping latency and replication latency into new history tables, with four new alerts: 5031 Availability Group data loss exposure, 5032 Availability Group not healthy or failed over, 5033 log shipping behind and 5034 replication latency. The history database upgrades itself to add the tables.
• Agent job history beyond msdb. Job runs are kept in the history database past msdb’s own retention, with a baseline for each job, a threshold dialog, and a new alert, 5023, for a job that has stopped running when it should have run.

Help

• Help pages and screenshots. New help pages for every new report in this release, Printing and Saving as PDF, Connection Problems, Patch Currency, Pop Out Windows and the Monitoring Service and Tray Application (including the service only secrets file for SQL and SMTP passwords), plus real screenshots from the sample database for the new reports and for more than 25 existing query tuning and storage reports.

Bug fixes

973 bugs were fixed in this release across Database Health Monitor, Azure SQL Health Monitor, Schema Drift, Data Compare, Query Loading Ramp, the monitoring service and the tray application, including 15 crash reports. The largest group came from the code review sweeps of the 33 new reports and the new Dashboards tiles, followed by the Badge of Shame and plan analysis checks, Quick Scan security checks, Availability Group and Agent job pages, grids that were wider than the window at 1280 by 900, and reports that gave wrong results on older versions of SQL Server and in non US cultures.

November 2026 Release – Version 4.1818 Release

Dashboards you build yourself: boards of charts, KPI tiles, tables and a live tile for every instance report, for one server or the whole estate, shared and shown on a wall; plus 9 new reports, pop-out report windows, a SQL Server patch currency report, and 672 fixes.

• 9 New reports
• 14 New features
• 672 Bug fixes

New reports

9 items. The theme this release is what the plan cache and the catalog cannot say on their own: how one statement’s calls are really spread, what the engine does behind the scenes with statistics, plans and foreign keys, everything wrong with a statement on one row, and how far behind each instance’s build is. Instance reports run from the instance node and Database reports from a database node.

Workload and plan cache

• Workload Sample (Instance report): Runs a short, bounded Extended Events capture of one to ten minutes and shows every statement that completed in it: calls, p50, p90, p99 and maximum duration per statement, the spread the plan cache averages away, sort and hash spills with their actual sizes, row by row fetch loops, and the statements the plan cache cannot show at all because they recompile on every call, run WITH RECOMPILE, live in encrypted modules or were evicted before anyone looked. Three views: Statements, Distribution and Events.
• Plan Cache Churn (Instance report): Draws the creation time of every cached plan over the last 6, 24 or 72 hours and finds the cliffs where hundreds of plans were born at once because the cache was emptied, names the likely cause from the error log, the default trace and the ring buffers (a restart, memory pressure, DBCC FREEPROCCACHE, ALTER DATABASE, RECONFIGURE), lists the queries whose plan came back different after the flush when Query Store is on, and measures turnover as plans compiled per minute against plans evicted per minute.
• Auto Statistics Activity (Instance report): Captures the auto_stats and recompile events for a window and shows which statistics SQL Server updated or loaded on its own, how long each synchronous update made the triggering query wait, which statements recompiled because statistics changed, which statistics update every few minutes on a hot table, the sample rate the automatic update chose against what the maintenance job uses, and where AUTO_UPDATE_STATISTICS_ASYNC, PERSIST_SAMPLE_PERCENT or NORECOMPUTE with a scheduled update would stop it. The Lifetime view reads the StatMan statements already in the plan cache with no capture.
• ORM Workload Profile (Instance report): Identifies the data access layer behind each connected program from the fingerprints it leaves in the plan cache and the session views (Entity Framework 6 and EF Core, NHibernate, Hibernate and JDBC, Dapper, LINQ to SQL, ADO.NET, ODBC and OLE DB clients, Access and Excel, Python drivers, SSIS, Power BI) and scores what each one is doing to the instance: nvarchar(4000) parameters against varchar columns, SERIALIZABLE sessions from a default TransactionScope, implicit transactions left open, per command SET chatter, N+1 loops, prepared handle churn, client side cursors, unparameterized literal SQL, huge IN lists and ARITHABORT OFF plans that differ from the ones tested in SSMS, each with the fix in that framework’s own vocabulary.

Queries

• Query Findings (Database report): One row per statement with every finding the query pages can make about it collected under one query hash: plan warnings, anti-patterns, operator smells, estimate errors, sniffed parameters, spills and grants, read amplification, chattiness, timeouts, lock footprint, regressions, missing index requests, remote queries, thread skew, instability and the Query Store signals when the store is on. Each finding has a severity, the findings add up to a score, and the statements are ranked by score, so tuning starts from the ten statements with the most wrong with them. Every finding links to the page that explains it with the statement already selected.
• Unstable Queries (Database report): Reads the min, average, max and last of every counter of each cached statement (worker time, elapsed time, logical reads, rows, grant and DOP), so a query that averages 400 ms because it takes 40 ms for most callers and 9 seconds for the unlucky parameter is separated from one that takes 400 ms every time, and classifies each by what varies: reads that vary with rows point to a data volume parameter, elapsed time that varies while reads hold steady points to waiting or blocking, a grant that varies to a sniffed sort or hash, a DOP that varies to thread starvation, and a last run far above the average means it just got worse. Works on every instance since SQL Server 2008 whether or not Query Store is on.

Tables and keys

• Foreign Keys (Database report): Lists every foreign key with the index on the child table that answers the referential check with a seek, or the scan of the child that answers it instead, the parent and child columns whose type or collation differ so every join between them converts, the cascade chains, the untrusted and disabled keys the optimizer cannot use to eliminate joins, and the evidence: the cached plans that scan a child table under a parent DELETE and the statements that convert across a mismatched key. Table Tuning Advisor gains an unindexed foreign key finding.
• Row Width and Data Types (Database report): Measures how wide each table’s rows really are against the declared maximum, how many rows fit on a page now and how many would fit if the columns were sized to the data they hold, and names the columns whose declared type is wider than any value in them: nvarchar with no non ASCII value, datetime holding only dates, bigint holding small integers, decimal holding integers, char that is mostly padding, nvarchar(max) holding short codes, int flags that are bits. The Grants view compares the optimizer’s row size against the real one for the top plans, and a Measure button samples large tables on request.

Estate

• Patch Currency (Performance Dashboard, all instances): One row per saved instance, worst first, with its build, friendly name and branch, the latest cumulative update on that branch, how many updates and days behind it is, the security builds it missed, the mainstream and extended support end dates and an overall status. Every figure comes from one shared SQL Server build catalog that the update available check, the masthead chips, Quick Scan and the silent report generator now read too, so they can no longer disagree, and the catalog was refreshed for this release. An unknown build is never reported as current, and Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance are listed as evergreen.

New features

14 items. The theme this release is seeing the estate the way you want to: boards you design, a tile for every report, and reports that open in their own windows.

Dashboards

• Custom Dashboards. A new Dashboards page under the Overview pages where you build boards of widgets on a 12 column grid: time series charts, KPI tiles with a sparkline and the change versus the previous period, status lists, Top N tables, gauges, punch cards, an estate heat map and an estate matrix, a stat strip, notes with a Markdown subset, and clock and image widgets for wall boards. Each widget shows one server, a server set, an environment tag or every registered server. Edit mode adds, moves and resizes widgets with snap, a widget palette, multi select with align, distribute and auto arrange, undo and redo, section dividers and inline rename. Boards are saved locally, exported and imported as .dhdash files, and a board history with restore and a rolling backup protect them.
• A tile for every instance report. Every instance report has a Report summary widget. History tiles read their number from the history database and follow the board’s time range, live tiles run one small query against the instance with a 5 minute cache, a timeout and one query per server at a time, and link tiles show the report’s description and keywords. A single click opens the report for that server. More than 90 tiles show the report’s own headline instead of a link: sessions by state, blocked sessions and root blockers, the top wait types, the slowest files, backup exposure, failed jobs, disk space with days to full, memory clerks, the Security Posture score, the Quick Scan score with a Scan now action, and the rest, each drawn in the shape that fits its data: bars, segments, dots, facts, progress, score rings, node flows, heat grids, trend lines and timelines.
• Built in boards and sharing. Read only built in boards cover Estate Overview, Server Detail, Storage, seven report categories (Performance and waits, Memory, Storage and I/O, Blocking, deadlocks and sessions, Backup and recovery, Jobs, Agent and security, Configuration, inventory and tools) and Availability Groups and Replication, with a board level server selector so one board works for any instance. Boards are shared through the history database with thumbnails, descriptions, who changed what and an update available mark on linked boards, and a board switcher with search, favorites, recent boards and folders moves between them, as does Ctrl+Tab.
• Dashboard charts. Charts have gridlines, a readable y axis, a last value marker and a hover crosshair synchronized across the board, plot several metrics or several servers with a legend and a second axis, and draw as line, area, bars or step with smoothing. Event markers show restarts, deadlocks, alerts sent, schema changes, memory pressure and failed jobs, a previous period ghost line and a normal range band from the last four weeks give context, drag zooms a chart or the whole board, a projection line and a full in N days number forecast growing series, a tile can be judged against its normal range, and a chart marks where history begins and where the collector was not running. Right click a chart to pin a note at a time, drawn on every chart of that server and shared.
• Time range, refresh and alerts on a board. Presets up to 30 days, a custom window, calendar presets, step back and forward, windows that end at a chosen time and a scrubber under the header. Auto refresh has an interval picker and a countdown, keeps the last values visible while it refreshes and pauses while editing; live metrics (sessions, blocked now, CPU now, page life expectancy now, batches a second) poll the DMVs every 10 to 30 seconds, and a value older than expected shows its age in amber. Thresholds have per metric defaults and limit profiles per environment, a tile that turns critical pulses, the board can toast and chime with quiet hours and mute per tile, and a changed value flashes briefly.
• Wall, kiosk and pop out. A full screen wall rotates boards with a dwell per board, a next board preview and two monitor support, and an attention layout collapses OK tiles into an All OK strip so the tiles that need attention grow. A kiosk command line switch opens a wall at sign in and recovers after sleep or a lost network. A board pops out into a slim window, a mini always on top ticker of the worst tiles or a presentation mode. Print, Save as PDF, a 2x image export with a white background option, and scheduled snapshots save a PNG or PDF of chosen boards to a folder or email them.
• Dashboard catalog and inspection. History metrics grow from 17 to about 35 (page reads, recompiles, tempdb, disk, memory, errors) and Top N tables from 4 to about 14 (waits by type, drives, growing tables, errors, failed jobs, applications). Board variables add a Database, Drive or Application picker in the header that filters the tiles that can take one. An estate drill re-points the board from a heat map cell or status row, with Back, and Shift+click adds the server to a multi server chart. An Inspect drawer per tile shows its data, SQL, timing and state history, with board diagnostics, a change log and CSV export.
• Dashboard look and accessibility. One spacing system, a typography scale with tabular figures so numbers do not jitter on refresh, board density (compact, comfortable, spacious), a six column reflow under 900 px, themed tooltips, code drawn icons, soft card shadows in the light theme, every color through the theme with dark mode contrast verified, high contrast, regional date and time formats, keyboard access (arrow nudge, Delete, Ctrl+S, Esc, Tab with Enter to open), live announcements for screen readers, touch gestures, dialogs refit for DPI, and a help page with an F1 route and a help link from the widget dialog.

Everyday use

• Pop out a report into its own window. Pop Out beside Refresh, Open in New Window on the Display menu and on the tab menu, and the Ctrl+K search open the report on screen in a window of its own, so several reports can sit on screen during troubleshooting. Each pop-out is its own process, so a report that hangs freezes only its own window, and drill-through, Back, Forward and F5 work inside it as they do in the main window. The window is started with the server name only, never a password, and it never writes the settings file.
• Excel exports hold real numbers. Save as Excel writes numbers, dates and values with units (GB, ms, percent) as real cell values with number formats, under a bold, frozen, filtered header with fitted column widths, so SUM, sorting and charts work in Excel without reformatting.
• Column filter lists are sorted. The value list in a grid column filter is sorted alphanumerically.

Security

• Security Posture export. Export Security Posture on the grid and band menus writes the whole run to a Word document, passes and manual checks included whatever the band is filtered to, with the SQL Server and operating system versions at the top, so a posture review can be sent as a record of every check that was made.

Plan Viewer

• Plan Viewer opens more than one plan. Drag a .sqlplan file onto the window, press Ctrl+O or pick from a recent list to open another plan without relaunching, Esc closes, the title names the file, and Save Copy As replaces the Save that rewrote the opened file.

Tray application

• Tray Start and Stop Service do not block. The tray icon and the Manage dialog stay responsive while the service changes state, the menu and tooltip show Starting or Stopping, a balloon reports the result, access denied is explained, and Stop Service asks for confirmation and offers Snooze instead, which is usually what was meant.

Bug fixes

672 bugs were fixed in this release across Database Health Monitor, Azure SQL Health Monitor, Schema Drift, Space Recovery, Query Loading Ramp, the monitoring service and the tray application, including 15 crash reports and 67 fixes in Azure SQL Health Monitor. The largest group came from the code review sweeps of the new Dashboards page and its tiles, followed by charts and grids that drew, filtered or clicked wrongly, reads that could not be cancelled, exports, the SSIS and SSRS pages, the deadlock and session waits pages, the Security Posture checks, and reports that gave wrong results on SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 and in non US cultures.

October 2026 Release – Version 4.1796 Release

Query tuning gets a big push: 28 new reports, a Query Card that shows everything known about a statement from any statement grid, a blocking alert that fires while the blocking is happening, help pages for the tray application, and 649 fixes.

• 28 New reports
• 9 New features
• 649 Bug fixes

New reports

28 items. The theme this release is query tuning: finding the statements that cost the most, why a plan changed, whether the estimates can be trusted, and what the tables, indexes and log behind them are paying. Instance reports run from the instance node and Database reports from a database node.

Query tuning and the Query Card

• Query Card (Ctrl+Q): One window that shows everything known about a statement: the text with the statement highlighted inside its module, the plan summary, min, average, max and last statistics, compiled parameters, Query Store history and the findings. Open it with Ctrl+Q or the right click menu from CPU by Query, I/O by Query, Waits by Query, Active Queries, Chatty Queries, Read Amplification, Long Running History and Query Store Regressions. It has Copy for a ticket, Open in Query Advisor, and a pinned mode that follows the selected row.
• Top Queries Right Now (Instance report): Ranks statements by cost over a short two read sample of the plan cache, so it shows what ran in the last minute and not what has accumulated since each plan was compiled.
• Query Anti-Patterns (Database report): Finds writing faults in the costliest statements, such as non sargable predicates, SELECT *, NOLOCK, catch all parameters and functions on columns, ranked by cost per day.
• Workload Text Search (Instance report): Finds every table, column, hint, comment tag or literal in the plan cache and in every database’s Query Store, ranked by cost.
• Chatty Queries (Instance report): Plots executions per minute against cost per call, the map that finds N+1 and round trip problems.
• Compiled Parameter Values (Database report): Shows the values each cached procedure plan was compiled for, how typical they are against the column histogram, and the fix.
• Query Timeouts and Client Aborts (Instance report): Lists the statements clients gave up on, captured with an attention event session, with the usual duration and a verdict.
• Result Set Size and Client Waits (Database report): Shows rows and estimated bytes per call and whether the client or the size of the result causes the wait.
• Live Query Progress (Instance report): Operator level progress of running requests, how close each is to done, which estimates are wrong, and a kill option.
• Query Store Roll-up (Instance report): The costliest statements across every database with Query Store for a window and metric, plus each database’s store state, size against its limit, capture mode, regressions and forced plan failures.

Plans, statistics and estimates

• Plan Change Timeline: Draws one query’s plans over time, with executions, average duration, compile marks and forced plan failures, next to the statistics updates, index and table changes, procedure alters, compatibility changes and restarts that happened before each plan change.
• Estimate Accuracy by Operator: Compares the last actual plan of the costliest cached statements operator by operator, finds the first operator where the estimate failed and names the likely cause (SQL Server 2019 and later).
• Statistics Behind the Busiest Plans: Ranks the statistics the costliest plans were compiled against, then and now, with actions to update, update with FULLSCAN or recompile dependents, and a script that does it in cost order.
• Histogram Explorer (Database report): Shows statistics histograms per column, the skewed values that break one plan for all, and ascending key problems.
• Plan Operator Census (Database report): Where the estimated plan cost goes, by operator kind, table and plan.
• Plan Settings by Database (Instance report): Compatibility level, cardinality estimator in force, database scoped configurations and plan cache evidence per database, with mismatches grouped.
• Thread Skew (Database report): Finds parallel plans whose work landed on one thread, names the operator and the partitioning behind it, and shows the cost.
• Remote Query Census (Instance report): Cached plans that leave the instance through a linked server, classified as full, partial or no push down, with per row round trips, rows pulled and a rewrite template.

Indexes, tables and storage

• Index Usage by Query (Database report): Shows which cached and Query Store plans use an index and how, and which statements made a missing index request.
• Read Amplification (Database report): Pages read per row delivered for each query, the share from storage, the probable cause, and an index efficiency ranking.
• Table Tuning Advisor (Database report): Ranks tables by plan cost, with a dossier for each table covering its statements, indexes, missing index requests, waits, statistics, growth and co-access.
• Write Amplification by Table (Database report): What one written row costs each table in indexes, LOB data, triggers, keys and history, both structurally and measured from cached DML.
• View Nesting (Database report): View on view depth, what sits beneath each view, the blockers inside, and what statements that use them pay to compile.
• Page Split Hot Spots (Instance report): Ranks indexes by page allocations, separates a random key from update growth, shows a live sampled rate and recommends a fill factor or key change.
• Storage Latency Now (Instance report): Per file read and write latency over a short sampled window against the lifetime average, with pending I/O, Resource Governor queue, volume, and the requests and background writers that drove the I/O.

Locking, log and connections

• Lock Footprint and Escalation Watch (Instance report): What each transaction holds locked now by object and mode, how close it is to the 5,000 lock escalation point, what an escalation would cover, waiters and lock memory.
• Transaction Log Write Pressure (Instance report): Flush rate and size, log write latency, the WRITELOG share of waits, and who writes the log.
• Connection Churn and Pooling Health (Instance report): Logins per second, connection age, pool resets and the applications that are not pooling, with a guarded option to kill idle sessions.

New features

9 items. The Query Card reaches more pages, blocking alerts become proactive, and the tray application gets its own documentation.

Query Card and statement pages

• Query Card reaches more pages. The Query Card also opens from the Query Store pages and the Historic Waits query drill. Its History section shows where a statement appeared in the history database, and its Plan section shows the Plan Viewer grade.

Monitoring and alerts

• Alert 5010 now alerts on active blocking. The blocking alert used to fire on historic blocking. It now fires on blocking that is happening, so you hear about it while it can still be fixed. The blocking query monitor start time moved from 1am to 12am, and the history upgrader applies the change to existing databases.
• Page Split Hot Spots can measure precisely. A Measure splits (1 min) button runs a short lived Extended Events page_split session and counts splits caused by inserts against splits caused by updates for each index. The measured cause replaces the inferred one and the session is always dropped. The button needs ALTER ANY EVENT SESSION and is disabled on SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2.
• Page Split Hot Spots right pane. Selecting an index docks a pane with the cause, evidence and advice, and copies the REBUILD or key change script. Leaf and above leaf allocations are drawn as segments with a thin inserts reference bar, and the first key column histogram is read so a composite key with under 100 distinct leading values counts as a random key.

Quick Scan

• Quick Scan security check runs on read only AG secondaries. The security check no longer fails when the connection is to a read only secondary replica in an Availability Group.
• Quick Scan reports checks that could not complete. The report lists the checks that could not be completed and no longer says 0 issues found when checks failed. Send to Steve now posts on a worker thread with timeouts and a working Cancel instead of freezing the window.

Tray application and installer

• Tray application help. Eight help pages cover monitoring and alerts, msdb versus the email queue, Servers, Settings, Email, the Web Dashboard, History, and the tray icon and menu. They open from a Help button and F1 on the Manage dialog, F1 on the SMTP profile dialog, and a Help item on the tray menu.
• The installer restarts what was running. After an update, the Database Health Monitor service and tray application are started again if they were running before, and the installer confirms the service reaches RUNNING.
• SQL Server build list updated. Version detection knows the latest SQL Server builds, including SQL Server 2025 build 5035.

Bug fixes

649 bugs were fixed in this release across Database Health Monitor, Azure SQL Health Monitor, Space Recovery, Schema Drift and the tray application. Most came from a code review sweep of the report pages and covered grid columns that could not be reached at narrow widths, text clipped at the edge of charts, SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 compatibility, and scripts that generated the wrong statement for unusual object names.

October 2026 Release – Version 4.1792 Release

Export that asks what the file should contain, recovery help for servers that will not connect, a Theme menu with Follow Windows, a right-click filter on any grid cell, a new Quick Scan security check, and 527 fixes.

• 0 New reports (1 new Quick Scan check)
• 8 New features
• 527 Bug fixes

New reports

No new standalone reports this release. One new check was added to the Quick Scan report, split out of an existing security check.

• SQL logins with the password policy turned off (Quick Scan, Database Health Monitor): Lists enabled SQL logins whose CHECK_POLICY is off, so the password never had to be complex, never expires, and the account never locks out after repeated failed attempts. These logins are usually created by vendor install scripts, which is why nobody remembers them. This was part of the weak SQL logins check and is now its own check, so a login with a blank password and a login with the policy off are reported and fixed separately. The blank password check keeps its place and now describes only blank passwords and passwords that match the login name.

New features

8 items. The theme this release is making the application tell you what is going on: why a server is not answering, what an export will contain, and how to get to the rows you want in one click.

Export and grids

• Export asks what the file contains. When a selection, a filter or several tables on the page make an export ambiguous, a small dialog asks what to save: a table, the selected rows, all rows shown, or every row including the ones a filter hides. When there is nothing to ask the export goes straight to the Save dialog. The file gets an About sheet, details and scope text, and the saved message now says what was written and where.
• Right click a cell to filter by it. The grid menu now offers Copy, Show only and Hide for the value in the clicked cell. Show only and Hide set the column filter without opening the filter dialog, and a message reports how many rows are showing and reminds you that Reset Filters undoes it.
• Line charts have axes, hover values and theme colors. The line chart control draws labeled axes, shows the value under the mouse, follows the light and dark themes, and handles long values without clipping.

Servers that will not connect

• A recovery page replaces the bare Server is Not Connected page. The page now names the server, shows the driver message, gives a plain English likely cause, and offers Try again, Edit connection, Copy error and Help. A successful Try again reloads the report you asked for. An instance that is still connecting shows Connecting with the actions disabled instead of a failure.
• Server tree badges and Retest connection. A server that could not be reached, or that refused the login, gets a badge in the tree with a tooltip saying why and when it last answered, and a Retest connection menu item. The state is learned from the reports you run, so no extra queries are sent, and a server that was merely busy is not badged.

Appearance and accessibility

• Theme menu. Display > Theme offers Light, Dark and Follow Windows. Follow Windows changes the application live when the Windows app mode changes, and an existing dark mode setting is carried over.
• Accessible names for the 10x controls. Charts, report cards, the navigation tree, the grid, the filter boxes and the range picker now expose names, roles and states to screen readers, a chart exposes its headline and each value, and Windows high contrast mode selects a system color theme. The self check now fails when a focusable control has no accessible name.

Decryptionator

• Responsive module list and source view. Loading the module list and View / Decrypt Source now run in the background with progress and a Cancel button, so the window stays alive while the server works, and closing the window during a load stops it cleanly and releases the dedicated administrator connection.

Bug fixes

527 tickets fixed, including 29 crash reports and 188 fixes in Azure SQL Health Monitor. The largest group is Quick Scan checks that gave wrong or incomplete results on SQL Server 2005 to 2008 R2, availability groups, Unicode database names and case sensitive collations, followed by history database upgrade steps (through version 1791) that deliver fixed procedures to databases already upgraded, the history upgrade failures at version 1494, and the unattended silent report generator, which no longer writes saved connection strings to its log.

October 2026 Release – Version 4.1743 Release

A Query Tuning Workbench, Backup SLA policies with a compliance dashboard, a Default Trace Events report, safer Quick Scan one-click fixes, easier report navigation, and 920 fixes.

• 2 New reports
• 13 New features
• 920 Bug fixes

New reports

2 reports. A backup compliance dashboard and a look at what the default trace has been recording on each instance.

• Backup SLA (Instance reports, Database Health Monitor): Shows every database against the backup terms it is assigned, with the policy, the full, differential and log targets, the current status, and the time each database has spent at risk. Violations are tracked as intervals, so a database that missed its terms overnight shows how long it was exposed, not just that it is late. Databases on unreachable instances are shown as Unknown instead of compliant, and SIMPLE recovery databases are flagged when a log term is set. The report exports to HTML, CSV and Word, and the policy and its targets also appear in Backup Status and Recovery Exposure.
• Default Trace Events (Instance reports, Database Health Monitor): Reads the default trace and groups what it recorded across all databases: data and log file autogrowths and shrinks, DBCC runs, objects created, altered and deleted, and sort and hash warnings. The trace path is found the same way for every report that reads it, including SQL Server on Linux.

New features

13 items. The theme this release is trying a query change safely, holding databases to a backup standard, making one-click fixes reversible, and making the application easier to move around in.

Query tuning

• Query Tuning Workbench (Tools menu). Runs a query with the actual execution plan and STATISTICS IO and TIME, and keeps each run as a numbered variation side by side. Every variation records elapsed time, CPU, reads by kind and by table, rows, memory grant, degree of parallelism, spills, warnings and a plan shape word. Best values are shown in bold and regressions of more than 20 percent in amber. A run happens inside a transaction that is rolled back by default, and the workbench asks first when it finds the query changes data or schema. Queries can be picked from the plan cache, Query Store or history, with a baseline variation V1 built from the cached plan without executing it. Compare shows metric deltas, per table reads, warnings added or removed, and operator changes. The missing index strip can try an index for real inside the rollback (disabled for instances flagged Production, with a typed confirmation) or as a hypothetical index. Sessions save as a .dbhtune file with no connection details, and as a standalone HTML report. Open it from the Tools menu, the Query Advisor, or Tune this query on What Is Active and Plan Cache.

Backup and health

• Backup SLA policies. Define per database recovery point and recovery time terms with Tier 1 to Tier 3 presets and offsite terms, and assign them by database or by pattern. The history database evaluates every database every 15 minutes, back dates when a violation started, and drives the new Backup SLA Violation alert (5035) with an all clear. Alert 5002 is unchanged and now points to the new alert.
• Technical Debt snapshots. Each completed scan is kept, the last scan is shown when the page opens, and it is compared with the one before. A since last scan line, a sparkline, a Change column and a New, Worse, Better and Fixed filter show whether the debt is growing or shrinking.
• Estate health on the Performance Dashboard. Each server card shows the reasons behind its status as chips, a server that does not answer or is not licensed is shown as its own state, low memory and plan cache rules were added, and servers are sorted worst first within each environment group.

Quick Scan

• Safer one-click fixes. Every Quick Scan one-click fix now goes through a confirmation that shows the exact T-SQL, with Open script instead as an alternative. The values being replaced are captured before the change so an undo script is offered, and every change is written to a fix log. Dangerous changes such as the recovery switch and DROP USER get an extra warning, and running a fix on other instances captures and logs each instance.

Navigation and everyday use

• Forward navigation. A Forward button, Alt+Left and Alt+Right, and the mouse back and forward buttons.
• Stop a slow report. A Stop button appears on the loading panel after 3 seconds, and Esc does the same. A Stopped card offers Try again and Go back.
• Copy Link to This Report. Copies a link to the current report that carries the server name only, and a /openreport command line switch opens it. A pasted link also opens from the command palette.
• Server tree menu. Open in SSMS, Copy server name and Copy connection details for SQL Server and Azure nodes, and Ctrl+C on a selected server.
• Recent Messages. The last 50 notifications are kept so a toast that faded can be read again, from Help, the command palette or Ctrl+Shift+M.
• Column filters survive a refresh. A live report that reloads its grid now reapplies the column filters instead of silently dropping them.
• F1 opens the installed help. Help links in dialogs and advisors open the help file installed with the product instead of the web, so they work offline, and Settings opens at the topic for the active tab.

Decryptionator

• Self test mode. A /selftest switch creates every encrypted object type, decrypts it, compares it to the original and returns a pass or fail exit code.

Bug fixes

920 tickets fixed, including 16 crashes and 131 fixes in Azure SQL Health Monitor. Most of the rest are wrong or misleading results in reports and Quick Scan checks on case sensitive collations, Unicode names, large files and Azure SQL Managed Instance, plus several history database upgrade steps (through version 1742) that deliver fixed procedures to databases already upgraded.

October 2026 Release – Version 4.1662 Release

A web dashboard for the monitoring service, an Index Consolidation Plan, new reports for Service Broker, data protection and Analysis Services, faster history collection, and 278 fixes.

• 3 New reports
• 9 New features
• 278 Bug fixes

New reports

5 pages. Two new database pages and their instance roll-ups for Service Broker and data protection, plus an Analysis Services instance report.

Database pages 2 reports, Database Health Monitor

• Service Broker: Queues, activation, the transmission queue, conversations, poison messages and endpoints, so a queue disabled by a poison message, messages that cannot be delivered or leaked conversations no longer go unnoticed.
• Data Protection: Which protections are applied to the sensitive columns: Always Encrypted, dynamic data masking, row-level security, ledger tables and sensitivity classifications. Findings call out sensitive columns with no protection, disabled security policies, masked columns that users can still read through UNMASK, and column master keys held only in a Windows certificate store. Only metadata is read, never an encrypted or masked value.

Instance reports 3 reports, Database Health Monitor

• Analysis Services: The SQL Server Analysis Services instance beside a SQL Server, with its mode, version and properties, memory against its limits, how recently each database was processed, and its sessions and running commands. Everything is read only and nothing is processed or changed. Use Set SSAS Server on the toolbar when Analysis Services is not on the same host.
• Data Protection by Database: The Data Protection summary for every database on the instance, with the unprotected sensitive columns counted for each one.
• Service Broker by Database: Every database with Service Broker enabled, its queues, transmission queue rows and conversations, read one after another with progress and Cancel.

New features

9 items. The theme this release is putting health information in front of you without opening the application, making index changes safer, and collecting history faster.

Monitor service and tray

• Web dashboard. The monitoring service can serve a read-only web dashboard with an estate overview showing the worst servers first, a page for each server with 24 hour CPU, page life expectancy and batch requests charts, and pages for alerts, deadlocks and blocking. It is off by default and listens on localhost only until you change that on the tray’s new Web Dashboard tab. Access uses Windows authentication with Viewer and Admin groups, and the same data is available as JSON.

Indexing

• Index Consolidation Plan (Real Time, Indexing). Weighs a database’s existing indexes and its missing index suggestions together, table by table, to find the smallest set of changes: exact duplicates dropped, narrower indexes merged into wider ones, missing indexes folded into existing ones and unused indexes removed. Anything that backs a primary key, unique constraint or foreign key, or that is named in an index hint or a forced Query Store plan, is blocked. It writes one ordered script with a matching rollback, and the script stops if an index changed after the plan was read.

Connections

• Trust an untrusted certificate. When a saved connection is refused because the server certificate is not trusted, the application now asks once per session whether to trust it, saves the change, reconnects and opens the Server Overview, instead of only showing Disconnected.
• Missing SqlClient native DLL. The service, tray and other executables now say which SNI native DLL is missing instead of filing a crash report for every connection.

History collection and upgrade

• Faster history collection. The procedures that collect table growth, chargeback usage, file size, index usage and deadlock history were tuned to run faster.
• More forgiving history upgrade. Alert steps run correctly when the login is db_owner but not dbo, the upgrade stops once instead of repeatedly on Amazon RDS when the login is not the master user, and a history version that cannot be read now says why.

Replication

• Merge replication resolver health check, and a reorganized replication instance report.

Quick Scan and Azure SQL Health Monitor

• Quick Scan can be zoomed. Ctrl and the mouse wheel enlarge or shrink the description and affected objects text in the detail pane, and the size is kept for the session.
• Azure SQL Health Monitor offers Try Again and F5 after a report fails to open.

Bug fixes

278 tickets fixed, including 9 crashes and 30 fixes in Azure SQL Health Monitor. Most of the rest are wrong or misleading results, reports that stayed blank or claimed success after a query timeout, leaked connections, and grids that did not fit the window at 1280×900. Several of these bug fixes were around overall performance improvements and reducing CPU on the DBHealthHistory database.

September 2026 Release – Version 4.1625 Release

Twenty-nine new reports covering hardware, licensing, memory, security and cost, twelve new alerts plus alerts you write yourself, a redesigned performance dashboard, sensitive data discovery, and more than nine hundred fixes.

• 29 New reports
• 30 New features
• 934 Bug fixes

New reports

29 pages. Ten new database pages and seventeen new instance reports in Database Health Monitor, a Consolidation Planner on the Tools menu, and a Security Posture report in Azure SQL Health Monitor. Several of them come with a new history collection, so they can show trends and not only the current moment.

Database pages 10 reports, Database Health Monitor

• CDC and Change Tracking: Whether change data capture and change tracking are keeping up, with capture latency, errors, cleanup, retention, side table sizes and their effect on log reuse.
• Data Compression: Which tables and indexes would shrink with ROW, PAGE or columnstore archive compression, with the estimated savings weighed against how often each one is updated.
• Full-Text Search: The health of each full-text catalog, with population status, crawl errors, fragments and how fresh each full-text index is.
• In-Memory OLTP: What the memory-optimized tables hold, whether each hash index has the buckets its keys need, the checkpoint files, and which resource pool the database is bound to.
• Module Execution Statistics: Stored procedures, triggers and scalar functions in the plan cache ranked by CPU, duration, reads, writes and executions, so an expensive trigger can finally be found.
• Plan Guides and Hints: Every plan guide and whether it still validates, alongside Query Store hints, forced plans and the hints written into the code.
• Sensitive Data: Finds the columns likely to hold personal or payment data by name and, when you opt in, by sampling values, then applies SQL Server sensitivity classifications from a preview script. Sampled values are never stored, shown or logged.
• Table Growth History: Rows and size of each table over time, the fastest growing tables, and a size forecast, from a new daily table size collection.
• Temporal Tables: How big each history table is and how fast it grows, the retention policy, period gaps, indexing and whether cleanup is running.
• Version Store and ADR: How big the persistent version store and the database’s share of the tempdb version store are, and which session or transaction keeps them from being cleaned up.

Instance reports 17 reports, Database Health Monitor

• Availability SLA: Monthly uptime percent, outages, restarts and unreachable windows for each instance, from a new availability collection in the monitoring service.
• Chargeback: Each database’s share of CPU, I/O, storage and memory per month, priced with cost rates you set, from a new hourly usage collection.
• Connections Over Time: How many connections the instance had over a period you choose, and when the spikes happened.
• Failover Cluster: The nodes of a failover cluster instance, the current owner, quorum, shared disks and failover history.
• Host and Hardware: Sockets, cores, NUMA layout, virtual machine, operating system, power plan, lock pages in memory, instant file initialization and memory settings on one page.
• In-Memory OLTP by Database: In-Memory OLTP memory per database across the instance, with each database’s resource pool binding.
• Key Exhaustion by Database: The identity columns and sequences closest to their maximum value across every database on the instance.
• Latches and Spinlocks: Sampled latch and spinlock deltas, the top classes over the sample, and guidance for each latch class.
• License and Edition Footprint: Cores, edition, the Enterprise features actually in use, whether a downgrade to Standard is possible, and an estate cost view.
• Memory Pressure: Ring buffer pressure events, memory clerk history, NUMA node memory and page life expectancy per node, with a Last 7 days tab from a new history collection.
• Module Execution Statistics by Database: The busiest procedures, triggers and functions from every database, ranked together.
• Permissions Matrix: Every login mapped to every database, with its roles, explicit grants and denies, and the access that carries risk.
• Sensitive Data by Database: Classified and suggested sensitive columns for every database, with payment card and SSN column counts, TDE state and a Scan All Databases button.
• Session Waits: Each session’s wait profile and its open cursors, for troubleshooting while the problem is happening.
• Version Store and ADR by Database: Version store size for every database on the instance, and what is holding each one.
• Windows Event Log: SQL Server related System and Application events, including disk, cluster and memory errors.
• Workload by Application: CPU, reads, writes and sessions per program, host and login, with a Last 7 days tab from a new history collection.

Tools

• Consolidation Planner (Tools menu): Stacks the historic CPU, memory, storage and I/O of several instances onto target hardware to show whether they would fit together.

Azure SQL Health Monitor 1 report

• Security Posture: Firewall rules, Microsoft Entra admins, auditing, TDE, Microsoft Defender and permissions for an Azure SQL database on one page.

New features

30 items. The theme this release is hearing about problems sooner, with more alerts and more history, and making the product calmer to use when something goes wrong.

Alerts and history

• Twelve new built-in alerts. Failed Agent jobs, Agent jobs running long, an availability group replica that is not healthy, a changed synchronization state, a high send or redo queue, deadlocks, 823, 824 and 825 I/O errors, high severity errors, a SQL Server restart, SQL Agent not running, log percent full and TempDB space.
• Custom T-SQL alerts. Write your own check in T-SQL and have it alert like the built-in ones, and a copy of a built-in alert now keeps its own thresholds and exclusions.
• New history collections. Memory pressure, workload by application, daily table sizes, hourly chargeback usage, instance availability and identity and sequence values are now collected into DBHealthHistory, which feeds the new 7 day tabs and the projected exhaustion dates on Key Exhaustion.
• The history database repairs itself. Tables dropped from DBHealthHistory are recreated during the upgrade, with a warning naming them, instead of the upgrade getting stuck and every report that reads them failing.
• Quick Scan and the 24/7 monitoring run faster.

Everyday use

• Redesigned main performance dashboard. The start page has been rebuilt around a new set of performance cards.
• Save as Excel. Grids that could be saved as CSV can now also be saved as an Excel workbook, from the right click menu or Export This Page.
• Find, filter and sort on the remaining plain lists. Deadlock Advisor, Needs Parameters Advisor, Connect to Multiple Servers and the Technical Debt object viewer now have the find bar, column filters, sorting, row count and export of the other grids.
• Plain English error messages. Common SQL Server errors such as permission denied, timeouts, deadlocks, a read only database or a full log are shown as a short sentence saying what to do, with the original text still available in Copy details.
• A friendlier crash dialog. An unexpected error shows a plain summary first with the technical detail behind Show details and a Copy details button, and every unhandled error is written to a local crash log.
• Fewer interruptions. Blocking message boxes have been replaced with toast notifications, confirmation dialogs use the same wording throughout, and the old Thanks for Using reminder is gone.
• The Settings dialog checks values as they are typed and says what is wrong, instead of silently changing a bad index, CHECKDB, backup or retention value on OK.
• PageWalker and Performance Viewer remember their window size and position, and Log Reader asks for its backup file in one labeled dialog instead of two prompts.

Connections

• Safe server removal. Removing a server from the list asks first and offers Undo for the rest of the session.
• Registered Servers round trip. Export and import through SSMS Registered Servers now keep each server’s alias and server type, and a bulk import tests credentials in the background with a Skip remaining option.
• DR has been added to the list of server types.

Reports

• Key Exhaustion replaces Identity Column Usage. The page now covers sequences as well as identity columns, and shows a projected exhaustion date from the collected growth history.
• Backup Status has a Last Diff column showing the most recent differential backup.
• The Query Store reports are hidden for the model database.

Quick Scan

• Three new checks. @@SERVERNAME is NULL or empty, a linked server points back at the instance it is defined on, and @@SERVERNAME does not match the actual server name.
• Ola Hallengren’s maintenance solution is no longer bundled. Quick Scan points to Ola’s site so the latest version is always the one installed.

Tray and service

• Notification settings. The tray’s Settings tab turns balloon notifications on or off and sets the repeat interval, with the value checked as it is typed.
• Snooze notifications. A Snooze Notifications menu silences balloons for 15 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, until 8:00 AM or until turned back on, and survives a restart.
• Health you can read without color. The tray icon states now differ in shape and symbol as well as color.
• Balloon clicks open History filtered to the server, procedure and status the balloon was about.
• Nothing goes quiet. Notifications held back by the repeat interval are counted and reported, and a failed poll or settings reload is shown instead of being ignored.
• The Windows service writes a startup and lifecycle log and reports a failed start to the Application event log, naming the step that failed.

Safer tools

• Schema Drift asks before it pushes a CREATE or ALTER to a live database, showing the target server, database and exact SQL, and reports a failed results email instead of failing silently.
• Space Recovery asks before Do it now runs, and a run that fails or is stopped partway ends with a summary of what completed and a follow-up script holding only the statements that did not.
• Decryptionator’s buttons and DROP guard checkbox say more clearly what they do.

Bug fixes

934 tickets fixed, including 48 crashes and 42 fixes in Azure SQL Health Monitor. Most of the rest are wrong or misleading results, reports that crashed or went blank on a query timeout instead of saying so, leaked connections and drawing resources, and grids and charts that did not fit the window at 1280×900 or in split view.

September 2026 Release – Version 4.1540 Release

Sixty-three new reports, a server type on every connection, exporting and remembered window layouts, a tray icon that reports on the service, and more than five hundred fixes across crashes, wrong answers and pages that did not fit the window.

• 63 New reports
• 25 New features
• 515 Bug fixes

New reports

63 pages. Twenty-five Query Store reports and fifteen SSRS reports in Database Health Monitor, plus twenty-three more plan, workload, capacity and storage pages in Azure SQL Health Monitor.

Query Store suite 25 reports, Database Health Monitor

• Query Store Health: Whether Query Store is still collecting, and whether the history it claims to hold is really there.
• Automatic Tuning: The plan regressions SQL Server found on its own, and whether it was allowed to force the earlier plan back.
• Batch Mode Candidates: Which busy queries are still running one row at a time, and what batch mode would be worth.
• Change Significance: Whether a query’s change in duration or CPU is larger than its own run to run variation could produce.
• Cost Drift: Whether each busy query still costs what it used to per execution, and when that changed.
• Deployment Impact: What each procedure, function and trigger cost before and after its own change.
• Duration Spread: Which queries have a worst case that is pulling away from their typical case.
• Hourly Drift: Which hour of the day is getting heavier or slower than that same hour used to be.
• Key Lookups: Which indexes send the busiest plans back to the table, which columns they went back for, and what a covering index would remove.
• Latency Service Levels: Whether queries finish within a target you choose, and which ones miss it most often.
• Load Sensitivity: Which queries are only slow when the database is busy, and which are slow on their own.
• Parameter Sensitive Plans: Whether each statement SQL Server 2022 split by parameter value has a split that changed anything.
• Performance Baselines: Which queries have recent readings that break limits drawn from their own earlier history.
• Plan Differences: What is actually different inside the two plans a statement has been running, operator against operator.
• Plan Resource Profile: Two plans for one statement, measured on the eight resources Query Store keeps.
• Plan Survival: How long a plan lasts before the optimizer replaces it, and which queries change plans most often.
• Query Feedback: Every correction SQL Server 2022 has made to a plan on its own, and the ones it tried and took back.
• Rank Movement: Which queries are climbing toward the top of the ranking before anybody complains about them.
• Residual Predicates: Which seeks and scans read rows only to throw them away, and where in the key the column that does the throwing away should sit.
• Session SET Options: Which statements were compiled more than once because callers connected with different SET options.
• Slow Periods: When the database ran slower than usual, and which queries brought work with them or were only held up.
• Statement Hot Spots: Which statements inside a busy procedure, function or trigger run far more often than the module around them, which is what a loop looks like.
• Throughput and Latency Headroom: What an execution costs at each level of load, and where the cost passes twice the quiet baseline.
• Timeouts and Failed Executions: The executions that were aborted by the client or ended in an error, and the time they threw away.
• Workload Change: What changed between two windows of the same length, one query at a time.

SSRS suite 15 reports, Database Health Monitor

• SSRS Caching and Execution: How every report on a report server is set to execute, and which slow, busy reports are not cached.
• SSRS Catalog Inventory: Everything published to a report server, who published it, and how much of the catalog each item accounts for.
• SSRS Data Sources: How each data source gets its credentials, and which ones will break a subscription because they cannot supply credentials unattended.
• SSRS Delivery History: Which subscriptions fail to deliver, and the message each attempt left.
• SSRS Delivery Queue: What the report server is doing right now, and what has waited long enough to be called stuck.
• SSRS Failed Executions: Every report and status pairing that did not end in success, including runs that failed while nobody was watching.
• SSRS Never Run: The reports, shared data sources, shared datasets and empty folders that nothing has used within the execution log’s retention window.
• SSRS Permissions: Every role assignment, the items that break inheritance from their folder, and the users who no longer have access to anything.
• SSRS Report Parameters: Every report’s parameters in one grid, and the reports that cannot be scheduled because a required parameter has no default.
• SSRS Schedules: Which schedules drive nothing, have expired or have stopped moving forward, and whether the Agent job behind each one is enabled.
• SSRS Server Configuration: Every setting the report server keeps, compared against its shipped default.
• SSRS Shared Datasets: Which reports use each shared dataset, and which datasets nothing uses.
• SSRS Snapshots and History: What the stored renderings weigh, and which ones nothing points at or that have expired.
• SSRS What Fills This Database: What every table in the report server catalog and its temp database holds, in plain words.
• SSRS Subscriptions: Everything the report server sends out on its own, and which subscriptions have quietly stopped working, with enable, disable and delete scripts on the grid.

Azure SQL Health Monitor 23 reports

• Ascending Keys and Rows Past the Histogram: Which statistics have a histogram that stops before the data does, and what the optimizer guesses is out there instead.
• Backup Schedule and the Point-in-Time Restore Window: Which automated backups the platform took, whether the log backups kept their cadence, and how far back a restore can reach.
• Change Tracking and What Cleanup Leaves Behind: What change tracking keeps in its side tables, and whether the cleanup meant to bound them is running.
• Client Waits and Results Left Unread: How long statements waited for their clients to take the rows they had ready, and which applications are waiting right now.
• Commit Batching and What Each Log Flush Carries: How little each log flush carries against a 60 KB log block, and which statements commit a row at a time.
• Compute Accounting and the Work No Query Explains: How much of the processor time this database is charged for belongs to no statement Query Store recorded.
• Data File Space and What a Shrink Would Release: How much of each data file is allocated and unused, drawn as a map of the file.
• Elastic Pool Neighbors and Who Uses the Shared Allowance: Who in an elastic pool uses the room the pool is paid for, and whether they use it at the same time.
• In-Memory Tables and Hash Bucket Sizing: What the memory-optimized tables hold against the tier’s limit, and whether each hash index has the buckets its keys need.
• Latch Contention and the Structures Behind LATCH Waits: Which internal structure each latch wait protects, so that a LATCH_EX at the top of the list turns into a pattern with a name and a fix.
• Memory Allowance and What Holds It: Who holds the memory the service objective pays for, and how much the database could give back.
• Optimizer Search Depth and Plans Cut Short: How much work runs on plans whose search was ended early by a timeout or by running out of memory.
• Parameter Sensitive Plans and Whether Each Split Pays: Where the optimizer drew its boundaries, and whether a call either side of one really runs a different plan.
• Peak Load and the Queries That Size the Tier: Which statements the busiest stretch of the window is made of, and how much lower the peak would be without each of them.
• Performance Counter Ratios and the Rules of Thumb: The classic Performance Monitor ratios, measured over a live sample rather than averaged since startup.
• Query Store Hints and Whether Each Still Pays: Whether each Query Store hint is still applied, and what a call costs with the hint against without it.
• Replica Lag and What Commits Wait For: How far behind the primary each replica is, and how long writers were held back because a replica could not keep up.
• Resize History and What Each Change Bought: Every time the database changed size, and whether the change bought anything the work used.
• Resource Coupling and Which Limits Rise Together: Which governed resources are busy at the same moments, which take turns, and which is busy on its own.
• CPU Run Queue and Who Waits for a Processor: How deep the queues behind the schedulers ran, and which statements are standing in them.
• Serverless Billing and What Keeps the Meter Running: What the serverless tier bills for, stretch by stretch, and which of the three billing rules was on top.
• Temporal History and What Versioning Keeps: How much history each system-versioned table keeps against the table itself, and whether a retention is holding it.
• Workload Groups and What the Platform Runs Beside You: Who spent the CPU, reads, writes and log of the SQL instance: your queries, another database’s, or the platform’s own work.

New features

25 items. The theme this release is knowing which server you are looking at, moving results out of the product, and keeping backup and restore scripts right.

Connections and servers

• Server types. Tag each connection Production, Test and so on. The type shows as a color chip in the server tree and can be used to sort and filter. When a new connection is hidden by the current type filter, the product now offers to show all types.
• Edit Connection. Change a saved connection in place instead of removing it and adding it again.
• License and instance limit state. The license state is shown in a dismissible strip, servers past the instance limit are no longer dropped silently, and the registration dialog gives a message per field.
• Settings shared between programs. A running program re-reads the settings file when another copy has saved it, so an instance added by a second copy is listed without a restart. Saves are atomic and wait out a busy file.

Everyday use

• Export to files. Grids, charts and pages can be exported as CSV, HTML and PNG.
• Remembered layout. The main window position and size, the navigation tree width and the column layout of the key report grids are remembered between sessions.
• One time window control. The same time window control now appears on the reports that have one, with a global default.
• Find and shortcuts. Grids have a find bar (Ctrl+F) and a row count, a Keyboard Shortcuts list shows the keys, and the shell controls have accessible names.
• Live panels say when they last updated, reconnect and retry by themselves, and stop querying while the window is minimized.
• Fragmented Index Advisor shows elapsed time and progress, can be stopped, refuses a second start and warns before it is closed mid run.
• Main window minimum size can no longer be larger than the screen it is on, and the window size is shown while it is being resized.
• Guide Me tour. Bug fixes and improvements to the guided track.

Backup and restore

• Copy the full restore sequence. Backup Status copies the complete restore sequence with every file name.
• Striped backups. Backup Advisor restores a striped backup with one RESTORE rather than one per stripe, and Backup Size and Backup Time Frames list a striped or mirrored backup once.
• MOVE options. Backup Advisor takes new file locations and writes the MOVE clauses for them.
• Backup Time Frames opens the Backup Advisor for a backup, with the original restore script.
• Log Viewer lists the log backups of the selected database.
• Backup Status is faster on instances with a large backup history.
• Log shipping settings. The Log Shipping report can change the settings of a chain that do not need log shipping set up again, and a right click shows the backup or restore history for the database. The Stedman log shipping procedures are now distributed in the DBHealthHistory database.

Quick Scan

• New checks. Warn when the instance backup checksum default is not 1, when Query Store is not enabled, and offer to schedule the Ola Hallengren jobs from check 238. The outdated build check now knows SQL Server 2025.

Reports and tools

• Download report and package definitions. A right click on the SSRS pages downloads the RDL, RSD and RDS files, and a right click on the SSIS grids downloads the DTSX package.
• Tray icon shows service health, and notifies when monitoring fails or SQL Server is restarted automatically.
• Decryptionator lists, reads and decrypts database DDL triggers.
• Historic rebuild reports what went wrong. An error during a history rebuild is now reported with its detail, and repeated upgrade steps are skipped when there is nothing to do.
• Obsolete projects removed. The Express scheduler and the component tester are no longer part of the solution.

Bug fixes

515 tickets fixed. Most of this release is behavior that was quietly wrong: a page measuring time on the wrong clock, a script that would not run on a name with a bracket in it, a grid whose verdict column sat off the edge of the window. The entries below group the tickets by what went wrong.

Crashes and exceptions

• Failures that are the server’s answer no longer file crash reports. A rejected login, a TLS or SSL handshake failure, a toast with no window, a redraw on an instance with no main form, and the Rewards page when the licensing service cannot be reached were all reported as crashes.
• Starting without an interactive session no longer files a crash report from the splash screen, and Azure SQL Health Monitor no longer exits at startup in that case. Test scripts hosting the assemblies no longer file crash reports either.
• DataCache threw a missing key error when two workers expired the same entry, and could spin forever when two threads added the same key. The startup license check also threw inside its own Catch.
• Job History, Connections by Database and the instance reports menu threw NullReferenceException or left a reader open on the shared connection.
• Navigating between pages leaked Labels and window handles until the process failed with “Error creating window handle”.
• Right click on a report grid threw OverflowException in the 64 bit build when the screen position was negative, and several tool menu items threw ArgumentOutOfRangeException.
• Quick Scan Deep Scan crashed when a check timed out, and threw “Collection was modified” when a lane was still reading at the timeout. Cardinality Report crashed when a count timed out, and divided by zero on a table without columns.
• Ignore Waits, Technical Debt settings, Backup Size, Historic Waits and Historic Version crashes on a blank or missing value, a double click on empty space, or an empty result.
• A settings value holding an unpaired surrogate or a control character made every later save fail.

Silent failures and misleading results

• Quick Scan fixes and the license key dialog reported success when the change had failed. Quick Scan fix dialogs now report the failure, and entering a license key no longer closes the dialog when the key could not be written.
• A connection added, edited, removed or imported was lost silently when connections.xml could not be written, and a connection list that could not be read was overwritten.
• Email alerts. The queue no longer sends a message without its attachments when they could not be read, and never re-sends a message the SMTP server already accepted.
• Update All Historic Databases reported an unreachable or stuck history database as checked and up to date.
• Overview panels kept re-running a query the login could not run. They now stop and say the login lacks VIEW SERVER STATE, and show “not read” rather than a verdict when a read fails.
• Query Store Health reported a healthy store as empty or stopped when a read timed out.
• Query Loading Ramp headless mode ran zero queries and exited 0 when given a parameter file with no data rows.
• Download latest version did nothing when the installer zip was unreadable.

Wrong answers

• Time measured on the wrong clock. Ages, uptime, recency and windows were measured on the workstation clock instead of the server’s on the Index reports, Connections pages, Msdb reports, SSRS and SSIS pages, Error Log, Server Overview, Memory Ladder, CPU and IO by Query, Missing Index and the Event Studio, Log Reader and PageWalker tools.
• Dates and regional settings. Historic queries and generated scripts now send dates in the invariant culture, Job History and the msdb purge scripts use yyyyMMdd, and Growth Trend, Rank Movement and several pages cut days in the reader’s local time zone. Pages no longer break under a non-colon time separator or a non-English SQL login language.
• Units and arithmetic. Total Memory converted KB to GB with 1000, IO by Hour hover text overstated IO by 1024, Log Viewer always showed a compression ratio of 100, and several time formatters mis-rounded minutes and sub-second values.
• Backup and restore answers. Restore plans over-counted log backups when a differential applies, judged restorability from the newest full rather than the base full, and took the file check from a COPY_ONLY full. Backup Size dropped COPY_ONLY backups, Backup Time Frames drew a backup that crossed midnight from the far left edge, and Growth from Backups and Backup Speed mixed in backups restored here from another server.
• Corruption Response Kit. Point in time scripts no longer restore a differential that finished after the stop time or apply log backups taken before the differential, heap salvage finds the heap’s pages, and salvage scripts work on identity and rowversion tables.
• Index reports. Duplicate and Unused Indexes now compare the sort direction of each key column and no longer pick a disabled index as the keeper. Index Review, Problem Indexes, Large Tables and Index Fragmentation also had wrong counts, wrong fill factors or one row per partition.
• Quick Scan scoring. Checks that could not run are left out of the score, the SQL Express file limit checks use the version dependent limit and add up data files only, Huge Error Log can now fire, and several checks reported the wrong row count, the wrong check number or failed on unusual database names.
• Query Store pages. Plan Survival no longer reports “Forces not holding” for a forced plan that is current, Workload Change compares windows holding the same number of complete intervals, Rank Movement no longer marks every quiet period as partial, Deployment Impact and Schema Changes count only the Query Store time they were measured over, and Plan Differences names a change that is only a plan warning.
• Deadlocks, blocking and sessions. Multi-cycle deadlock reports labeled every victim after the first as Winner, the blocking heat map scaled by percent_rank so a five second blip looked like a peak, Active Blocking missed cycles and chains headed by an unseen session, and grids with two requests or two transactions in one session showed one of them twice.
• Historic Waits charts added an extra day, or dropped the last day, at several zoom levels, and the Year zoom scrolled by the wrong interval.
• Technical Debt counted matches with LEN instead of DATALENGTH, skipped several checks and dropped the last line of each syscomments row.

Generated scripts

• Names with a bracket or an apostrophe. Generated and executed scripts across Schema Drift, Problem Indexes, Columnstore, Partitioning, Quick Scan, VLF Advisor, Decryptionator and the report queries now double a closing bracket, quote with QUOTENAME and pass names as parameters instead of splicing them into T-SQL.
• Rebuild and undo scripts. LOB Columns rebuild scripts carry the index’s own options and write ON [scheme]([column]) for a partitioned index, the Space Recovery VLF script rebuilds every log file, the clustering key script keeps DESC, and the foreign key health script writes one CREATE INDEX per distinct column list.
• Log Reader undo scripts for a table with no primary key, and for a modify on computed, rowversion or dropped columns, now produce statements that run.
• Data Compare. The sync script only re-enables triggers that were enabled, large text columns are no longer reported as changed when only DATALENGTH differs, float values compare exactly, and a DELETE is no longer scripted for a row whose large value could not be read in full.
• Schema Drift. CREATE OR ALTER no longer becomes an invalid ALTER OR ALTER, UNIQUE constraints compare as their own object type, permission, table, key and contract scripts carry the attributes that change behavior, and same named objects in different schemas are no longer merged.

Layout, scaling and drawing

• More than 150 grids, charts, footers and dialogs had a column, caption or button pushed off the edge at 1280×900, 1600×900 or 125 to 150 percent scaling. The verdict or advice column of the SSIS, SSRS, Query Store, msdb and index pages is now on screen without scrolling sideways.
• Charts and panels that vanished or were painted over when the detail pane, the ad or the assistant narrowed the page, including Security Posture, Quick Scan, Deadlock and Failed Jobs lanes, and the Replication toolbar.
• Drawing leaks. Dozens of chart controls, TimeGraph, EnhancedListView and several panels created fonts, bitmaps, brushes and tooltips on every redraw or resize and never released them.

Connections, settings and history

• Settings and connection saves. The settings file saves atomically, serializes access between processes and no longer overwrites a change another program made. The recent servers list is saved bar separated, so a server written with a port is no longer split.
• Connect strings quote the database name, and the Connect dialog no longer quotes a SQL authentication password twice.
• Historic monitoring. Retention days of 0 now means keep forever, alert procedures handle white space in the ignore list, index usage tracking copes with databases in a restoring state, and the Tray history honors escaped pipes so long messages display correctly.
• Tray passwords. SMTP and server passwords saved by the Tray are now readable by the LocalSystem service.

Azure SQL Health Monitor

• Microsoft Entra sign in. The Tenant ID is now applied to service principal, interactive and device code sign in, and a device code with a blank Tenant ID shows the user code.
• Retries and reloads. A statement that timed out or was already sent is no longer repeated, a reload during the first load of a page is ignored, and a typed password is kept only after it worked.
• Wrong verdicts. Replication waits were counted as throttling, the throttling verdict tested only the top eight waits, Top Queries memory ranked a sum of peaks, and the Plan Regressions verdict said plans did not change when other rows did.
• Connections. Import stops at the license database limit, Edit Connection reloads the open page, Back returns to the report you came from, and duplicate connections are refused.

September 2026 Release – Version 4.1517 Release

Ninety new reports, a drill-through navigation layer that connects them, actions that carry a fix from one instance to the rest of the estate, and a large pass over silent failures.

• 90 New reports
• 38 New features
• 47 Bug fixes
• 45 New chart shapes

New reports

90 pages. Three new report suites in Database Health Monitor cover the two system databases and the SSIS catalog that nothing in the product read before, plus thirty-one new plan, workload and resource pages in Azure SQL Health Monitor.

msdb suite 22 reports, Database Health Monitor

• Agent Activity: Is SQL Server Agent up, how long has it been up, and what is running right now. Filtered to the current Agent session, so a job left running by a service restart is not reported as running today.
• Agent Security: Who owns the automation on this instance, and who can run it.
• Agent Settings: How Agent itself is configured, and what that is doing to msdb.
• Alerts and Operators:  If something breaks tonight, does anyone hear about it.
• Backup Ledger: Whether the record of the backups is itself complete, honest and maintainable.
• Backup Speed: How fast each backup runs, and whether that is changing.
• Data Collector: Whether the collector is running, and what it has been failing to upload.
• Growth from Backups How big each database was, going back as far as msdb does.
• Job Commands Every line of T-SQL, command line and script the Agent jobs run, in one place.
• Job Step Failures: Which step of which job fails, and what it actually says.
• Missed Runs: What was supposed to run and did not.
• Subsystem Load: Whether Agent can actually run everything that is scheduled at once.
• Maintenance Plans: What the plans do, and what they said the last time they ran.
• Database Mail Setup: Who can send mail from this instance, through which server, and what is configured.
• Database Mail History: What this instance has tried to send, what happened to it, and how long it took.
• Mail Content: What this instance is actually putting in the post.
• Mail Recipients: Who is on the receiving end of this instance.
• Restore History: What has been restored onto this instance, when, from where, and by whom.
• msdb Space and Retention: What is filling msdb, how far back it goes, and what trims it.
• Package Store: The SSIS and DTS packages stored inside msdb itself.
• Policy Evaluation: Whether Policy Based Management is doing anything here, and what it found.
• Third Party Objects: What somebody else installed into msdb.

master suite 16 reports, Database Health Monitor

• master Overview: What is in master on this instance, one line per page, and a way into each of them.
• master Backup and Rebuild Readiness: If this server were gone tomorrow, how much of what is in master could be put back.
• master Change Ledger: What has changed at server level on this instance, in one list, in order.
• master Server Permissions: Who holds server level rights that no fixed role gave them.
• master Server Triggers: Code that runs on every login or every DDL statement on this instance.
• master Startup Procedures: What runs before anybody connects, and what somebody set as a startup parameter.
• master Service Facts: What account this instance runs as, how it starts, and whether it has ever been changed.
• master Endpoints: What can connect to this instance, over what, on which port, and who is allowed.
• master Credentials: Which outside identities this instance holds, and what uses each one.
• master Keys and Certificates: What master is protecting, and whether any of it has ever been backed up.
• master Server Audits: Whether auditing is on, whether it is actually writing, and what it would catch.
• master Resource Governor: Whether anything on this instance is being capped, and whether the cap is being reached.
• master Database Properties: Which databases on this instance are set up differently from all the others.
• master File Map: Every file of every database on this instance, including the databases nobody looks at.
• master Footprint: How big master is, where it lives, and whether that size is normal.
• master User Objects: What somebody installed in master, when, and what happens to it when this server is rebuilt.

SSIS catalog suite 20 reports, Database Health Monitor

• SSIS Catalog Inventory: What is deployed here, who deployed it, when, and what has never run.
• SSIS Catalog Health: Why SSISDB is the largest database on the instance, and whether its own maintenance runs.
• SSIS Who Fills It: One package is writing most of this database. Which one?
• SSIS Packages Run: What ran, when, and how it ended.
• SSIS Running Now: What is executing at this moment, and what has been claiming to execute since a restart.
• SSIS Package Failures: What failed, how often, and with what message.
• SSIS Reruns and Retries: Which packages only work on the second go.
• SSIS Package Speed: Is this run slow, or is this package always like that?
• SSIS Batch Critical Path: The night ends at 05:12, and which package made it so.
• SSIS Batch Completion Trend: What time the overnight batch actually finishes, and whether that is moving.
• SSIS Schedule and Concurrency: What runs when, what runs at the same time as what, and what was never scheduled.
• SSIS Self Contention: Is this package slow because it is slow, or because of what runs beside it?
• SSIS Inside the Package: Which task inside the package burned the time, and how many times it ran.
• SSIS Data Flow: How many rows actually moved, along which path, and which component held the line up.
• SSIS Child Package Map: Which packages call which, derived from what actually ran.
• SSIS Connection Reach: What this catalog talks to, and what breaks if it goes away.
• SSIS Environments and Parameters: Which environment supplies what, and which parameter nothing supplies.
• SSIS Run Time Overrides: Which runs were started with something changed, and what.
• SSIS Job and Package Disagreement: Which Agent jobs report success on a night the package failed.
• SSIS Dumps and Legacy Runtime: Two columns every execution carries and no report read.

Instance level Database Health Monitor

• Bottleneck Mix by Database. What kind of problem each database, or each expensive query across the instance, has before anybody decides what to do about it. Every other query page ranks by cost; this one throws the amount out of the position and places each subject in a ternary triangle by how it divides its effort between processor, storage and contention. Databases that are offline, restoring or unreadable by the connected login are named rather than silently dropped, and so is a database with Query Store or wait capture switched off.
• Deprecated Features, rebuilt as a report class. The old XML grid report is replaced. Descriptions now come from a knowledge table rather than a 267-branch CASE inside the XML, the counts carry a per-day rate against instance uptime instead of a raw cumulative counter, the counters are sampled twice so the page can say whether a feature is still being used right now, and a new locator layer says where each deprecated feature is being used instead of leaving the reader with an instance-wide number and nowhere to go. Statements issued by Database Health Monitor’s own collector are marked as such.

Azure SQL Health Monitor 31 reports

• Missing Index Consolidation: The missing index requests on each table, folded into the fewest indexes that answer all of them, with create / widen in place / already covered decided per index.
• Key Lookups and Covering Index Candidates: Which indexes send the busiest plans back to the table, which columns they went back for, and where adding columns stops paying for itself.
• Statistics Behind the Busiest Plans: Which statistics the busiest plans were compiled against, the condition each is in now, and how much of the badly misestimated work depends on it.
• Plan Survival and How Long Plans Last: How long a plan lasts before the optimizer replaces it, drawn as a survival curve that keeps the plans not yet replaced.
• Plan Differences and What Changed Inside: What is actually different inside the two plans a statement has been running, operator against operator.
• Plan Resource Profiles: Two plans for one statement, measured on all eight resources Query Store keeps.
• Estimate Cascade: Where inside a plan the row count stopped being measured and started being guessed.
• Residual Predicates and Key Column Order: Which seeks and scans read rows only to throw them away, and which column order would stop it.
• Live Query Progress and Estimate Overruns: How far through its plan every long running query is, and which operator it is working in.
• Batch Mode and Columnstore Candidates: Which busy queries are still running one row at a time, and what batch mode would be worth.
• Cost Drift: Whether each busy statement still costs what it used to per execution, and when that changed.
• Work Scaling and the Break-Even Between Plans: What one execution costs, priced against how much it was asked to do.
• Row Width and How Many Fit on a Page: How wide each table’s rows are, and how many the storage engine can fit on a page.
• Segment Elimination and the Order of the Data: How much of a columnstore index a query has to read, decided by the order the rows arrived in.
• Session SET Options and Split Compilations: The settings the workload arrived with, and the statements compiled more than once because callers disagreed.
• Concurrency Footprint and the Worker Allowance: How much of the concurrency allowance each query holds, and how much was held at once.
• Lock Footprint and Escalation Risk: What each transaction has under lock right now, and how close it is to escalation.
• Parallel Thread Skew and Idle Workers: Which parallel queries handed nearly all their work to one worker, and which operator did it.
• Waits by Application, Host and Login: Which application, host and login is doing the waiting, and what each is waiting on.
• Storage Latency and What Waits for It: How long one read and one write actually take on this database’s files.
• Transaction Log Space and What Holds Truncation: How much of the log is in use, which part cannot be released, and what is holding it.
• Resource Rooflines: Which of the service objective’s two allowances is the one standing in front of each query.
• Service Tier Fit and What Stops You Resizing: Which sizes this database could be on would have carried the workload it already ran.
• Burst Load and What the Averages Hide: How long each governed resource sat at the ceiling, and how much a five minute average hides.
• Load Hysteresis and Recovery Lag: Whether a query gets slow when the database gets busy, or stays slow for hours after.
• Slow Periods and What Runs In Them: The hours this database was slower than usual, and which queries were heavy in exactly those hours.
• Workload Regimes and When the Mix Changed: Whether this database has been doing the same thing all window, and if not, when it stopped.
• Workload Shifts: Which time of day each query does its work, and how wide a window it lands in.
• Workload Turnover: How much of what runs now is code that did not exist when the window opened, and what it costs.
• Maintenance Windows and the Quiet Hours: Where in the cycle there is a stretch long enough for heavy work, and whether it is quiet every time.
• Read Offload and What Could Run on a Replica: How much of this database’s work never writes anything, and could run on a read replica.

New features

38 items. The theme this release is getting from a finding to the next step without leaving the product: a shared drill-through layer, actions that run the change, and a guided path for someone who knows the symptom but not the page.

Navigation and drill-through

• Drill-through navigation across the product. A shared catalog of drill targets and a typed focus token (database, table, index, query, session, job, login, drive, wait type) means a row on one page can open the page that explains it, already filtered to the thing the row named. Reached from a new Go to group on the right click menu.
• Right click menus on the reports that had none. A new list view base adds report-specific items to the right click menu without a second menu appearing on top of the built-in copy and filter items. Added to Backup Status, Database by Size, Failed Jobs, Job History, Large Tables, Logins, Memory Grants, TDE Status, Suspect Pages, Buffer Pool by Object, Index Contention, Table Use, Table Space Breakdown, Unused Indexes and others.
• Session follow-through on the live pages. Sessions, Connections, Open Transactions, Blocking Tree and What Is Active share one landing routine, so a session followed from one page lands the same way on the next, with reuse of a closed session’s id detected rather than reported as the same session.
• Error log entries lead somewhere. The classifier now reads the database, login and drive out of the fixed wording SQL Server uses, and offers them on the Go to menu. An entry that matches none of it offers nothing rather than a guess.
• Related links rebuilt. The related-links panel is driven from an expanded catalog rather than a hardcoded list, and is covered by its own tests.
• Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right walk one list. The two hand written Select Case chains behind the instance report arrows are replaced by a single ordered list, so both directions are read off the same order and a report cannot be reachable from one side only.
• Go Back history improvements across report, database and instance navigation.

Actions: running the fix, not just scripting it

• Run on other instances. A change that just succeeded on one instance can be run on the other connected instances, with a read-only check per instance first that says whether it already has the change. The three database loops now quote with QUOTENAME, and cost threshold counts as set at 50 or more so a server deliberately raised to 75 is left alone.
• DBCC CHECKDB queue. Runs CHECKDB over every overdue database on an instance, one database at a time, instead of opening the single-database dialog once per database.
• Agent job actions. Start, stop and enable a job from the Failed Jobs and Job History pages, with the pending-request state (asked to start, not yet begun) reported as itself rather than as running or idle.
• File growth advisor. Set a file’s autogrowth to a fixed size, or grow it now, from the Files and File Utilization menus. A grow that would leave a volume below its free-space floor is refused.
• Update Statistics window. Runs UPDATE STATISTICS for the rows selected on the Index Statistics report, rather than scripting a whole database of statistics.
• Log chain follow-up. After switching a database between SIMPLE and FULL on Backup Status, the page now says what is left undone: the log keeps clearing until a full backup is taken, and the Agent job steps that can no longer back up that log are listed.
• Quick Scan instance fixes moved into a shared module so the report and Run on other instances run the same statements.
• Open in SSMS. Opens SQL Server Management Studio on the instance the report is showing, in the database the row names, with the page’s script already loaded. A Settings tab finds the installed copies, or takes an explicit path.

Guidance and first run

• Guide Me. A guided track for someone who knows the symptom but not the page: a strip pinned to the right of the main window opens one page at a time and says what to look at on it. Tracks are defined in data, and progress is remembered.
• Rail help panel. Replaces the fixed help text box with a panel sized to what it holds, and replaces the Select Case in MainForm that knew about six timer modes with per-page help text for the whole product.
• Loading messages. A pool of lines shown while the product is waiting on a server, instead of a bare progress bar.

Historic monitoring

• Historic options dialog. One place for the history database settings that were previously spread across several dialogs.
• Historic database rebuild. A supervised rebuild of the history database with a per-step ledger (ok, skipped, failed), a confirmation that names what will be dropped, and a verification pass that reads back what the rebuild was supposed to leave behind. A rebuild that threw nothing is not assumed to have worked.
• Databases with history that are no longer on the instance are listed rather than left invisible.

Deadlocks

• Deadlock Advisor rebuilt. A new shredder reads the whole deadlock graph rather than stopping after the first lock, a classifier names the pattern, and a graph view draws the resources and the waits between them.
• T-SQL colouring. The two statements at the centre of a deadlock are now coloured T-SQL in a fixed-width font instead of bare text boxes in the dialog’s proportional font.
• Deadlock history and objects pages updated to the same shredder, so every deadlock page agrees about what a graph contains.

Interface

• Toast notifications. Non-blocking status messages in three levels, replacing message boxes raised off the UI thread for results that only need to be seen once.
• Themed confirmation dialogs. A shared confirm dialog with named buttons (“Delete 12 entries” / “Keep”) and question, warning and danger treatments, replacing MessageBox.Show Yes/No prompts across the alerting log, replication, Query Store enablement, and elsewhere.
• Every Designer dialog refitted onto one base class. One baseline font and scale, consistent padding and button order, and AcceptButton / CancelButton set so Enter and Esc always do something. Around 40 dialogs.
• Colour palette work. A rewritten colour helper with a chart palette that returns a distinct colour per series offset, tested against colour blind mode and greyscale.
• Index Review rebuilt. The single 1,450-line control is split into a model, grid, table view, script pane, theme and writers, with a new Missing Indexes page grouped by table: the table list on top with size, write volume and total benefit, and tabs beneath for suggested indexes with a CREATE INDEX script each, the table’s columns, and the indexes it already has.
• New chart shapes. Bottleneck ternary chart, deprecation Pareto, backup size trend, historic waits columns, msdb rank bars and time lanes, SSIS run lanes, rank bars and clock trend in Database Health Monitor; 31 new chart controls in Azure SQL Health Monitor, including survival curves, Hasse diagrams, bipartite plans-to-statistics plots, Mekko, roofline, orbit, Lorenz and phase dial.

Platform and packaging

• Optional encryption in the connect dialog. Two new choices, Optional and Optional, trust the server certificate, for servers that offer encryption but do not require it. Saved connection strings stay readable by older versions: the words written are only ones System.Data.SqlClient accepts, and the Optional keyword Microsoft.Data.SqlClient needs is added in memory as each connection opens.
• Crash reporting. Unhandled exceptions, unobserved task faults and background worker failures now reach the crash report endpoint with the full exception, its inner exceptions and the stack from the line that threw, deduplicated by exception type and throwing frame so one repainting bug does not file a report per frame. StedmanCore reports through a hook set by the application, so reports carry the application’s version rather than the library’s.
• MSChart is no longer redistributed. The remaining MSChart-based charts were rewritten on the product’s own drawing code, and the MSChart redistributable is removed from the installer.
• Licensing and update checks moved to the V4 web service in both Database Health Monitor and Azure SQL Health Monitor.
• SQL Server build numbers updated for 2017, 2019, 2022 and 2025.
• Settings dialog gains the SSMS path tab and additional options, with tab indexes preserved for callers that open a specific tab.
• Single-instance mode for support captures. Crash sweep and demo recording can be limited to one instance, so a settings file holding every server ever connected does not cost a connection attempt per server.
• Migrated to Microsoft.Data.SqlClient with the driver selectable, and NuGet package references refreshed across the solution.

Bug fixes

47 items. A large share of this release is failures that used to happen quietly: a worker that stopped with nothing written down, a page that drew an empty answer, a Catch that sent a bare message and lost the line that threw.

Crashes and exceptions

• Blocking Monitor threw on an empty interval box. The interval was parsed straight off the text box, and the box empties itself whenever its own parse fails, so pressing a letter and then Start Monitoring threw FormatException. A “0” parsed fine and then hit ArgumentException from the timer. Neither had a Catch anywhere on the path.
• Blocking Monitor threw ArgumentOutOfRangeException when opened before any instance had been connected.
• The server tree lookup threw a NullReferenceException whenever the instance was no longer in the tree, and again inside the Catch that was meant to handle it. It also left a flag set, which swallowed the user’s next click.
• Clicking during a tree rebuild threw. Tree loading pumps messages while it rebuilds, and a click that landed in that window threw.
• Historic Query Waits Advisor threw IndexOutOfRangeException past the last time slot.
• The server health report threw on an empty object name before the first test could be made, and threw into the outer Catch instead of skipping the object.
• Startup subtree loading threw for every offline instance on an implicit conversion of an empty value to Double.
• The AI panels’ background workers had no completion handler, so anything the worker threw was swallowed and the panel printed one sentence with no message, no log line and no report.
• Index LOB Columns and related pages replaced themselves with “The report being run appears to have crashed” because the database was not set before the page was built.
• Statistics and Table Size advisors reported faults from the UI thread, with a stack starting at the Catch rather than the line that threw, and without the exception type.
• Incremental Shrink advisor reported server messages and code faults through the same path, so a real fault was indistinguishable from a server response.
• Word automation failures are caught rather than taking the export down with them.
• Unobserved task exceptions are now trapped. .NET 4.8 drops them silently, so these failures previously left no trace at all.

Silent failures and empty pages

• The quiet auto-refresh path on the live pages threw the exception away. Sessions, Connections, Open Transactions, Blocking Tree and What Is Active each had a quiet reload that discarded any failure without writing anything, so a server that had gone away simply stopped updating. A connection failure inside a countdown threw with no message, no log line and no change on screen.
• The Database Overview worker stopped silently on a null read, so the page came back partly built with nothing said about why.
• A Catch on the Database Overview page returned early, which skipped hiding the progress bar and starting the refresh timer.
• An unmatched branch on the Database Overview page drew nothing, leaving the reader on the page they were already on with no indication anything had happened.
• The Technical Debt scan lost its worker’s error. The failure went into e.Error with nothing reading it, so there was no log entry and no rows.
• Technical Debt now counts and reports encrypted modules rather than skipping them silently.
• Quick Scan showed ex.Message in a message box and nothing else for each of its checks, not even a log line, so nothing was ever filed. Its Catch also appended “Historic monitoring must be enabled” to every failure regardless of cause.
• Instance Problem Indexes skipped the refresh timer because it constructed the report class directly.
• Menu items that could not resolve their target did nothing. They now open the picker with nothing bound, or log the reason, rather than silently ignoring the click.
• Report failures inside DatabaseHealthComponents were invisible to the crash reporter: a section that threw showed red text, and a worker that threw showed a status line, and neither was reported.
• A failure during a silent report run had nowhere to go and was discarded; it is now written down.

Wrong answers

• Deprecated Features printed blank descriptions for the rows that mattered most. The description CASE used the collapsed documentation label for compatibility level, so six counters on SQL Server 2019 and seven on 2022 came back NULL; Database Mirroring missed the same way. Twenty more branches matched no counter published by any supported version. The counts also had no denominator, so a count of 3 on a server up for 400 days and one up for ten minutes looked identical.
• The Failover Compatibility report drew an empty chart and a toolbar of dead controls on an instance that is in no availability group. It now says so in a message, and reads the replicas before building anything.
• The deadlock query threw away every lock after the first, and used four separate OUTER APPLY nodes() calls that could not be lined up with one another.
• Quick Scan instance fixes failed on database names containing ]. The names were bracketed by hand, so ALTER DATABASE failed to parse (Msg 156) and that database kept its setting while the rest changed.
• An inner join dropped endpoints with no TCP row, and dropped job history rows whose job had been deleted.
• A chart with more series than the palette had entries gave every series the same colour, because the palette ignored the offset it was passed and returned black.
• An SSIS query counting executions against seven days of job history reported three weeks of packages as if they were in the window.
• A time range derived from marks alone drew a single mark as the whole of time.
• A chart segment was found by walking the hit test downward, which arrived at the wrong column.
• A deprecation locator reported line 1 for every module that matched only the second alternative of the pattern.
• Databases the connected login cannot enter are reported as rows rather than failing the whole estate-wide scan, which is the failure that silently dropped one database out of a scan.
• A query using syntax added in SQL Server 2017 or 2022 would fail the batch at compile time on every older instance, which no TRY/CATCH can rescue.
• Large Tables opened the wrong drill target (expanding the table’s database instead of the Disk Space report for the instance).
• Job History opened the whole list instead of the job that was picked.
• The Waits Advisor was reachable only by double click.

Connections and history

• The historic upgrader failed on a clean database. A version step was missing, and the waits index script ran at a version some databases had already passed; the index creation moved to a later step and a duplicate index definition was removed.
• Testing the history connection could replace the application-wide shared connection with a failed one, and left a Pooling=false connection open from a previous run.
• Overview workers left a reader open on the shared connection, failing the next stage with a second-DataReader error when a load was cancelled early.
• Dropped and refused connection errors were reported as dropped connections regardless of cause, so a server refusing the query read the same as a network drop.
• A connection kept by one step was dropped by the next, leaving the page to reconnect for work it already had a connection for.
• The historic waits report is released when the history database is replaced, so its date range, drill path and filters do not describe rows that no longer exist.
• Historic monitoring alert and tracking procedures corrected for long running queries, blocking queries on both SQL 2016+ and older builds, CPU snapshots, and the DBCC CHECKDB alert.

September 2026 Release – Version 4.1501 Release

Database Health Monitor 4 is now available, representing a major overhaul rather than a visual refresh. Nearly every existing report has been rebuilt with improved queries, charts, verdicts, and drilldowns, while dozens of entirely new reports answer questions the previous version could not. To celebrate the release, all new users—and anyone whose previous trial expired—can use Version 4 free through October 31, 2026.

The redesigned interface includes full dark-mode support, more meaningful charts, plain-English findings, severity indicators, and one-click chart copying for tickets and emails. Performance has also improved through expanded background processing, with Schema Search now approximately three-and-a-half times faster. Registered servers can be imported and exported, making it easier to move Database Health Monitor to a new computer.

New reports include Blocking Tree, Recovery Exposure, Migration Planner, Security Posture, Optimized Locking, TempDB Metadata Contention, and Table Space Breakdown. Availability Groups, replication, log shipping, and linked-server reports have also been rebuilt to clearly show whether data is still moving and where problems exist. Version 4 is automatically tested across every supported release from SQL Server 2008 through SQL Server 2025.

The release also includes Azure SQL Health Monitor, a separate 63-report product designed specifically for Azure SQL Database. It analyzes Query Store, resource limits, throttling, plan regressions, memory grants, TempDB spills, read amplification, and cardinality-estimation accuracy without installing anything or creating Azure resources. One license covers both products, and existing Version 3 users can upgrade while retaining their registered servers, settings, and DBHealthHistory data.

See the Release Notes page for details on updates in older versions.