How I Use the First Responder Kit

You’ve downloaded sp_Blitz, sp_BlitzIndex, and sp_BlitzCache from the First Responder Kit,and you’ve run them a few times. You know there’s a ton of advice in there, but…it’s kindaoverwhelming. Where should you even start? What should you tackle first? Are thereparameters that would help diagnose your specific situation?

In this one-day course, I’ll walk you through running them on a live production server, and we’llinterpret the results together. I’ll have a series of workloads running against a live server, andyou can follow along too if you bring a laptop with SQL Server 2016 or newer and the freeStackOverflow database – any size will work.

Here’s how the day will go:

· We’ll run sp_Blitz to do a server-wide health check

· We’ll run sp_BlitzFirst to look at your server’s wait stats and storage throughput since itstarted up

· We’ll run sp_BlitzCache to find the queries causing your top wait types, using my favoriteparameters for deeper diagnosis and trending

· We’ll run sp_BlitzIndex to diagnose the most urgent indexing issues specifically related toyour top wait types

· We’ll write up a report to hand off to the rest of our team about what we learned about the server today, and what actions everyone needs to take in order to see a performanceboost

This course is 100% demos: the only slides are the introductions at the start of the day, andthe recap at the end of the day. The rest of the time, we’ll be working in SQL ServerManagement Studio.