Now, click Edit on the Data Details tab, and in the resulting Select Data Source dialog box, choose the .odc file you created, and click Open. In the Use data from section of the Data Details tab, select the Data member, table, view, or cube name option. Select the MyCounterData table to complete the requirements of the Data Details tab.
Next, you'll want to make the chart easier to view on a Web page in three dimensions, so click the Type tab and choose the 3D Area and the specific area chart on the bottom left, as Figure 2 shows. Now, click the 3D View tab. When you're in Projection mode, click Orthographic. Right-click the chart, and select Field List from the context menu to show the Chart Field List, which isn't the same as the Field List on a chartless data access page.
Next, on the Chart Field List, drag a counter such as Cache Hit Ratio to the Drop Data Fields Here section of the chart. Right-click Sum of Cache Hit Ratio, and select Auto Calc and Average. Now, drag Hour to the Drop Category Fields Here section from the Chart Field List dialog box. Do the same for Minute. Next, expand CounterDateTime by month and drag Days to the Drop Series Fields Here section of the chart.
Now you're going to get rid of some clutter caused by too many annotations on the X-axis. Right-click the black X-axis and click Commands and Options. Click the Axis tab and choose None from the Major Tick Marks drop-down list. Finally, to complete your data access page, click the title text box and type the title System Monitor Performance Data. Now, you can save the data access page to a Web site on your development IIS 4.0 (or later) server and open the resulting HTML page from your IE 4.01 or later browser. For example, we saved our page as wSQLPerfData.htm in the C:\inetpubs\wwwroot folder on our Web server. Then, we browsed to the page at http://<our server>/wSQLPerfData.htm. The data access page lets you drill down into your data by hour, by minute, and by day on the Web page, as you saw in Figure 1. The page also lets you calculate additional statistics on the data, including the average, sum, and standard deviation. When you browse to the page, you'll get the alert message
This page accesses data on another domain.
Do you want to allow this?
To avoid getting this message every time you render a data access page, you need to add your IIS server as a trusted site to IE.
To use IE to view the chart on a workstation, you need to have Office Web Components (OWC) installed on the workstation. Office XP installs these components by default. If your clients don't have Office XP installed, you can supply the components (available at http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/default.aspx) on a Web page for clients to download. Once OWC is downloaded and installed, clients can use IE and a read-only version of the component to view, but not drill down into, data. This OWC read-only access is currently free from Microsoft.
A Rich "Poor Man's" Solution
Our DBA team has used techniques similar to these to view SQL Server charts over the Web for more than 8 months. Now, we've established historical baselines that we can use for comparison if a performance problem occurs. Because we view the charts regularly, we know a few things about our system: We know that our cache-hit ratios are excellent, processor usage is acceptable, OS backups punish hard disks in the early morning hours, and most user activity occurs between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM. In the current economy, the word "free" has also perked up our management's ears—especially when we compare our solution to the cost of commercial Web-charting and SQL Server—monitoring solutions. My boss likes to go to the Web site and view SQL Server-related charts—he thinks it's a great way to see what his DBAs do. And the Web charts help my Oracle and DB2 DBA peers to troubleshoot SQL Server problems when I'm not around. I hope you'll realize these and other benefits when you try this "poormon" monitoring solution.
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