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Maximum Number of Actions on an Extended Event

Jonathan Kehayias hits the limit:

Did you know that there is a limit to the number of actions you can add to a single event in Extended Events? While I was playing around with Trace Flag 9708 for my previous blog post, one of the things I wanted to try to see was whether it would be easy to determine the impact of adding too many actions to a single event. I picked a single event, in this case wait_info, and I checked all of the actions for the event in the UI, and tried to create the event session. I was surprised when I got a validation error back so I clicked on the details link and got the following:

Session validation for the alter operation failed. (Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.XEvent)

Read on for more details and to see the limits. Applying Swart’s 10% Rule to this, you’d say 3 actions for any given event, which is probably a little bit low but in the neighborhood of what I’d call reasonable for a given XE.