Alert thresholds depend on the nature of your applications. Some queries may have arbitrary tolerance thresholds. Building an efficient monitoring platform takes time. 😉
2 Prometheus alerting rules for SQL Server. Exported via Ozarklake/prometheus-mssql-exporter. These rules cover critical and warning conditions — copy and paste the YAML into your Prometheus configuration.
groups:
- name: OzarklakeMssqlExporter
rules:
# 1m delay allows a restart without triggering an alert.
- alert: SQLServerDown
expr: mssql_up == 0
for: 1m
labels:
severity: critical
annotations:
summary: SQL Server down (instance {{ $labels.instance }})
description: "SQL server instance is down\n VALUE = {{ $value }}\n LABELS = {{ $labels }}"
- alert: SQLServerDeadlock
expr: mssql_deadlocks > 5
for: 1m
labels:
severity: warning
annotations:
summary: SQL Server deadlock (instance {{ $labels.instance }})
description: "SQL Server {{ $labels.instance }} is experiencing deadlocks ({{ $value }}/s)\n VALUE = {{ $value }}\n LABELS = {{ $labels }}" wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/samber/awesome-prometheus-alerts/refs/heads/master/dist/rules/sql-server/ozarklake-mssql-exporter.yml
SQL server instance is down
# 1m delay allows a restart without triggering an alert.
- alert: SQLServerDown
expr: mssql_up == 0
for: 1m
labels:
severity: critical
annotations:
summary: SQL Server down (instance {{ $labels.instance }})
description: "SQL server instance is down\n VALUE = {{ $value }}\n LABELS = {{ $labels }}" SQL Server {{ $labels.instance }} is experiencing deadlocks ({{ $value }}/s)
- alert: SQLServerDeadlock
expr: mssql_deadlocks > 5
for: 1m
labels:
severity: warning
annotations:
summary: SQL Server deadlock (instance {{ $labels.instance }})
description: "SQL Server {{ $labels.instance }} is experiencing deadlocks ({{ $value }}/s)\n VALUE = {{ $value }}\n LABELS = {{ $labels }}"