Phil Factor gives us a great walkthrough of Extended Events:

A lot of the information about the way that SQL Server is working that can only be provided by Extended Events (XEvents). It is such a versatile system that it can provide a lot more than would otherwise require SQL Trace. If done well, Extended Events are so economical to use that it takes very little CPU. For many tasks, it requires less effort on the part of the user than SQL Trace.

Extended Events (XEvents) aren’t particularly easy to use, and nothing that involves having to use XML is likely to be intuitive: In fact, many DBAs compare XML unfavourably in terms of its friendliness with a cornered rat. SSMS’s user-interface for Extended Events, thankfully, removes a lot of the bite. For the beginner to XEvents with a background in SQL, it is probably best to collect a few useful ‘recipes’ and grow from that point. Templates and snippets are invaluable.

Phil’s workbenches (especially those written with Robyn Page) are fantastic ways of digging into a topic of interest.

Grant Fritchey shows how to make the Extended Events UI a lot more useful:

WHAT!!!!?!!

You mean I can make that upper window useful? Yes. Not only that, but, what ever columns you add to the upper window, your copy of Management Studio remembers what you did. The next time you open this Extended Events session in the the Live Data window, the columns you selected will be there. However, your ability to customize Live Data is even easier than that. If you notice, in the upper part of your SSMS window is the Live Data tool bar. Near the end is a button innocuously titled “Choose Columns.” Click on that and a window similar to this will open:

And you can share the results with others.

Tibor Karaszi argues that it’s never too late to get into Extended Events:

I know, I know. New habits are hard to learn. Many of us have been using SQL trace and the Profiler GUI for a very long time. And we know that we are supposed to move over to Extended Events (XE), but we postpone it for some later time. And then we give XE a try, and some thing doesn’t work as we want. So we go back to more familiar territories.

But XE has really grown on me over the last few years. I like to share the things that I initially didn’t like with XE, and how I overcame them. And also some other of my tips to make it easier to be productive with XE. I will deliberately minimize showing T-SQL and queries against the XE dynamic management views here. As you use XE more and more, you will probably use T-SQL to a higher degree. But this blog post is for those of you who want to “get into” XE and I find using a GUI is great as a starting point. Assuming the GUI is any good, that is. And I think the SSMS GUI is, for most parts.

There are a lot of tips here, so check out Tibor’s advice.

Matthew McGiffen shows how you can take the results of an Extended Events session and insert them into a table:

You just need to select a destination database connection and table name and the export starts. Be warned that it doesn’t default to the current database connection. I’ve fallen for that and overwritten the data in a table with the same filename on a different SQL instance – whoops!

If the option is greyed out when you open the menu it may be that your event data is still loading. If you look closely in the above screenshot you can see I have over 8 million events captured by this session, so it took a while to load before I was able to export.

There are a few gotchas that Matthew shows, but it’s a useful technique.

Aamir Syed gives us a simple example of using the Extended Events UI to create a new session:

Many of us have not made the effort to switch from profiler to Extended events.  It’s 2018, if you haven’t found a few hours to learn about this incredibly powerful tool, I urge you to do so now.

I’m going to provide a quick means of tracking queries with extended events. This is not an example of how comprehensive this is, but I hope that it atleast spurs some interest.

One of the main reasons we use profiler is to quickly capture some real time data. I’m going to not only show you how to do that with extended events, but this same session can be a historical view as it’s so easy to sift through and filter through the data. (No you don’t have to create a table for the result sets ala profiler).

Click through for step-by-step instructions.

Matthew McGiffen walks us through what the system_health Extended Events session gives us:

When Microsoft introduced Extended Events (XE) in 2008, they also gave us a built-in XE session called system_health.

This is a great little tool. I mainly use it for troubleshooting deadlocks as it logs all the information for any deadlocks that occur. No more having to mess about making sure specific trace flags are enabled to ensure deadlock information is captured in the error log.

It also captures the SQL text and Session Id (along with other relevant data) in a number of other scenarios you may need to troubleshoot:

• Where an error over severity 20 is encountered

• Where a session has waited on a latch for over 15 seconds

• Where a session has waited on a lock for over 30 seconds

• Sessions that have encountered other long waits (the threshold varies by wait type)

Simply knowing what this session includes can give you a leg up on troubleshooting, especially when it’s a machine you haven’t seen before.

Jess Pomfret goes looking for Extended Events relating to the transaction log:

I was troubleshooting an issue last week which led to me firing up extended events to look at records being written to the transaction log, I typed into the search bar ‘Transaction’ hoping to find something that would do the trick and didn’t quite find what I was looking for.

After a few more failed attempts I headed to the internet and found a post by Paul Randal describing exactly what I needed for this situation, using the [sqlserver].[transaction_log] event. Hold on, that’s exactly what I searched for.  I ran the T-SQL within his blog post, the event was successfully created and gave me the information I was looking for.

But, as Jess points out, you can still get to it from the GUI.  Read on to learn how.