I’ve spent a bit of time with Microsoft’s new database watcher tool for Azure SQL recently.
There are a lot of things I like about database watcher– which is currently in preview and which refuses to Capitalize Its Name– but it does one big thing that I really, really like: it collects data from Query Store. You can access that Query Store data from built-in database watcher dashboards, query it using KQL, or (something something) in Microsoft Fabric if you’ve got money to burn on your monitoring data.
Query Store has been available since SQL Server 2016, but I haven’t yet heard of monitoring tools that truly take advantage of it. It’s about time.
This is where I’d also plug QDS Toolbox for on-premises environments. A good amount of the reporting information comes out of Query Store and it helps manage Query Store to boot.