Extended Event, Unified Way for Performance Tracing

Extended Event, Unified Way for Performance Tracing
By : Kasim Wirama, MCDBA

SQL Server has provided multiple tools for tracing performance related data, such as profiler, system monitor, Windows event log file and SQL Server log file. Each tools will collect different data (and sometimes overlapping data) with their own characteristics. There are issues regarding to multiple tools here :
1. Each tools has different format, data collection, data analysis. So you need to use that tools to analyze different data characteristics and format.
2. It is difficult to grab correct information because of difficulty to see big picture of database performance for the existing tool doesn’t integrate data from multiple source such as windows operating system and application that accessing database. As we are aware that SQL Server is not separate entity from operating system and application so that performance issue might not solely come from database.
To address this issue, SQL Server 2008 introduces extended event as part of database engine with generic event handling capability.
Extended events offers same functionality as Profiler has; but with fewer resource overhead. The minus point is that there is no GUI for extended event currently. So it is my wish list that Microsoft will create GUI for extended event and service broker.