When you’re a consultant, you need to get diagnostic data from your clients.

When you’re talking to a new sales prospect – do you waste a lot of time asking basic investigation questions like what version they’re on, how much data they have, what kinds of workloads they have? You know they’re not really giving you accurate answers because often they just flat out don’t know.

Instead, imagine just emailing them a diagnostic app that gathers data and packages it into an Excel spreadsheet they can send you. You can review their server before your sales call even starts, and you can give them real value right from your first interaction.

When you’re working on a client’s SQL Server – do you waste a lot of time running diagnostic queries, saving their outputs to a file, and then trying to shuffle that data around from place to place? Do you feel like you’re constantly having to update your diagnostic queries each time you find a new problem, and you don’t really wanna be in the writing-basic-scripts business anymore?

Instead, imagine the diagnostic app running deeper diagnostic queries, like gathering the customer’s top queries by reads, CPU, duration, executions, and more, saving those execution plans out to files that you can review later. You’ll spend less time hitting F5, and more time doing the kinds of analysis that your customers really pay you for.

When a client has an emergency and you’re not around – isn’t it frustrating that they ask you, “hey, SQL Server was slow yesterday around 6pm – do you know why?” You ask them questions, but…of course they didn’t gather any diagnostic data, or if they did, it’s a useless Profiler trace with no insight. You can’t give them answers, and everybody’s frustrated.

Instead, imagine the customer running this diagnostic app whenever they have problems, and emailing you the spreadsheet saying, “Hey, when you get time, can you analyze this and see why our SQL Server was slow at this moment?” The data would include running queries, wait stats, memory metrics, and more.

When you hit a wall and you need help – do you email your network and kinda fumble around, not sure how to pass the data around? Everybody seems to use slightly different ways of gathering and viewing data, and it’s really hard to interpret someone else’s data.

Imagine being able to pass a standard spreadsheet around to your network – after redacting client-sensitive stuff – and asking, “Hey, you’ve seen this metric setup before – do anything about these metrics look weird to you? What would you do next in my shoes?”