Gianluca Sartori shows one valuable use for XESmartTarget:
In this case, imagine that you wanted to observe the commands executed on a SQL Server instance and save them to a file to process them later. Of course, Extended Events can do that with the built-in targets. However, when you write to a file target, the file has to reside on the disks of the SQL Server machine (well, actually, the file could be sitting on a file share writable by SQL Server or even on BLOB storage on Azure, but let’s keep it simple). How do you use the storage of the client machine instead of using the precious filesystem of the server machine?
Here is where XESmartTarget can help you with a CsvAppenderResponse. This Response type writes all the events it receives to a CSV file, that can be saved on the client machine, without wasting disk space on the server. You can decide which events to process and which columns to include in the CSV file, but more on that later.
Read on to see how the whole thing works.