Public Preview: Performance monitoring for Azure SQL in Database Hub

We're excited to announce the public preview of performance monitoring for Azure SQL in Database Hub in Fabric.

Performance monitoring brings the health and performance of your SQL estate into Database Hub. You see every supported database in one place and quickly spot the ones that need attention. It works across:

• Azure SQL Database
• Azure SQL Managed Instance
• SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines
• SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc

Microsoft collects performance-related telemetry, runs the pipeline, and stores the data for you. There's nothing you need to deploy and nothing to operate. Turn it on, and your SQL resources show up on the Performance page in Database Hub, which is free.

This post is a deep dive on the performance part of Database Hub. For the full tour, including the Overview, Estate, and Security pages, read Database Hub in Fabric: Now in Public Preview.

Get started in three steps

1. Open Database Hub in Fabric.
   • During the preview, a Fabric administrator needs to turn on the Database Hub tenant setting. See the prerequisites.
2. Turn on performance monitoring for your SQL resources. See Enable performance monitoring for Microsoft SQL.
3. Go to the Performance page to see which databases need your attention.

See your entire database estate in Database Hub

Performance monitoring powers the Performance page in Database Hub. Database Hub is built for when you need to look across all your databases, not just one at a time. It brings your database estate across Azure, on-premises, and other clouds into one place, including:

• Azure SQL and SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc
• Azure Database for PostgreSQL
• Azure Cosmos DB

The Performance page comes with prebuilt dashboards, so you can see performance at a glance without building anything yourself. The dashboards are designed to quickly answer two questions:

• Are my databases healthy?
• Which ones need my attention?

From there, you can drill into resource usage, waits, and session activity to understand what's driving a change in performance.

With Database Hub, you can:

• Get estate-wide visibility into health and performance across database types
• Investigate the root cause of performance issues across many databases
• Use AI-assisted analysis to find and explain issues faster

To learn more, see What is Database Hub in Fabric?

Why we built this

Monitoring SQL performance at scale often meant building and running your own monitoring stack. Before you could effectively answer, "Which of my databases need attention right now?" you typically had to:

• Deploy and configure a collection resource, such as a watcher or an agent
• Build a telemetry pipeline to move the data
• Provision a data store, and then pay for it, secure it, and keep it running
• Build dashboards on top of all of it
• Repeat for every new server, database, or region

That's a lot of work before you see your first chart. And every step is another thing that can break, drift, or quietly stop collecting data.

Customers are also turning to AI to make sense of their database estate. They want an AI agent that can spot a performance problem, explain what's causing it, and recommend a fix. But an AI agent is only as good as the data it can reach. It operates best with one consistent source of performance data across every database, not a patchwork of tools and data stores.

We heard this feedback loud and clear from customers. You told us you love having at-scale dashboards and ownership of your performance data. You also told us that setting up a telemetry stack was time-consuming, scale limits got in the way, and running the data store added operational burden and cost overhead. One customer put it simply: they wanted to spend less time managing their telemetry infrastructure and more time managing and improving their databases.

Performance monitoring keeps the parts you valued and removes the infrastructure you had to manage. That's why it feeds Database Hub directly. You get one place to see your whole estate, and your AI agents get one consistent source of performance data.

No infrastructure to manage (or pay for)

With performance monitoring, there's no monitoring infrastructure for you to deploy, size, or run. It's all managed by Microsoft, with no scale limits on how many targets you can monitor.

Telemetry is collected close to the database engine and sent to a Microsoft-managed telemetry pipeline and data store. Access to that data is governed by Azure role-based access control (RBAC), so people only see telemetry for the resources they already have access to.

Consistent telemetry across your SQL estate

Performance monitoring collects the same core set of performance data across every supported SQL deployment, whether it runs in Azure, on-premises, or in another cloud. That means one mental model and one set of dashboards in Database Hub, instead of a different tool for every flavor of SQL.

The preview collects performance-related telemetry, including:

• CPU and memory utilization
• Wait statistics
• Active sessions
• Storage I/O and database storage utilization
• Performance counters
• Client connections
• Database properties
• Availability group, replica, and database replica health

Go beyond Database Hub with KQL

Database Hub covers the most common performance questions. When you need a view that Database Hub doesn't show, you can query the same telemetry directly with Kusto Query Language (KQL). The telemetry is available through a Microsoft-managed, RBAC-governed endpoint, so you don't need to create or pay for your own Azure Data Explorer cluster.

Use it to:

• Build your own Real-Time Dashboards and reports
• Connect tools you already use, such as Grafana or Power BI
• Give an AI agent access to investigate performance across your estate

To get started, see Query performance monitoring telemetry. It includes the schema, connection steps, and ready-to-run starter queries.

Turn on performance monitoring

How you turn on performance monitoring depends on the resource type. For all of the steps in one place, see Enable performance monitoring for Microsoft SQL.

To view performance monitoring data, you need:

• The Reader role, or a role with higher privileges, on each subscription that contains the resources you want to view.
• The Microsoft.AzureArcData resource provider registered on each subscription. For steps, see Register the Azure resource provider.

Availability

Performance monitoring is available in public preview in select Azure regions. For the current list of supported regions, see Regional availability and data handling.

Learn more

• • Database Hub in Fabric: Now in Public Preview
  • What is Database Hub in Fabric?
  • Enable performance monitoring for Microsoft SQL
  • Query performance monitoring telemetry
  • Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews