Case Study: Global Asset Management Group achieves rapid troubleshooting and historical playback of 35 SQL Server instances with Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise by Quest

Global asset management group monitors dozens of SQL Server instances with Spotlight® by Quest

A global asset management group that supports one of the world’s largest investment banks — with nine DBAs across the UK and India and some 35 SQL Server instances — migrated from a costly mainframe to .NET applications on SQL Server. During and after a multi-year, terabyte-scale migration the DBA team was repeatedly the first line of investigation for system slowdowns, but needed reliable historical visibility beyond what SQL Server buffers retain to pinpoint root causes.

The team deployed Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise to continuously capture and replay historical database and server activity. Spotlight’s playback and multi-level metrics let them trace network I/O, CPU/memory use, parallelism, locking, deadlocks and workload spikes, enabling faster root-cause analysis, code and index tuning, better capacity planning, and coordinated workload scheduling. As a result, troubleshooting became quicker and evidence-based, migration testing was validated for production, and recurring performance issues were resolved with greater confidence.