Documentation / Activity Monitor / Common Workflows

Common Workflows

Incident and daily-ops playbooks for Activity Monitor.

“What is running right now?”

  1. Double-click the instance tile to open the dashboard.
  2. Enable Auto-Refresh (5–10s) or click Refresh Now.
  3. On Active Requests, enable Show blocking only if sessions are stuck.
  4. Expand the blocker chain; copy the query or open the plan; kill only with change approval.

Investigate a CPU / duration spike

  1. Open Performance and pick a source (Plan cache / Individual XE / Query Store) that you actually collect.
  2. Brush the chart time range around the spike; Top Queries follows the window.
  3. Open the heavy query → plan → decide index vs rewrite vs wait (see Waits / Metrics).

Turn on alerting

  1. Right-click the instance → Deploy History Collection (Agent + dblense objects).
  2. Open sidebar ALERTS; set thresholds and Database Mail.
  3. Use Evaluate Now once; confirm a test alert appears in the Alerts inbox.