Announcing a New Live Online Class: How I Use the First Responder Kit

During the hands-on labs for my Mastering classes, when I’m answering an attendee question, this kind of thing happens a lot:

• Attendee: “How would I find the query causing that missing index recommendation?”
• Me: “Oh, good question – you can use the sp_BlitzCache @SlowlySearchPlansFor parameter. Here’s how it works.” (Does a quick demo)
• Attendees in unison in Slack: “WHOA I HAD NO IDEA THAT PARAMETER EXISTED”
• Me: “Yeah, there are so many parameters. One of these days, I need to teach a one-day class just on the First Responder Kit’s parameters and how you use them.”
• Attendees: “OMG YOU MUST DO THAT”

So for 2020, I put together a new live class:

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 kinda overwhelming. Where should you even start? What should you tackle first? Are there parameters that would help diagnose your specific situation?

In this one-day course, I’ll walk you through running them on your production server, and we’ll interpret your results together. Space is limited in these particular live classes because I’ll be giving you advice on your specific server.

Here’s how the day will go:

• You’ll run sp_Blitz to do a server-wide health check
• You’ll run sp_BlitzFirst to look at your server’s wait stats and storage throughput since it started up
• You’ll graph the server’s performance over time with the Power BI Dashboard for DBAs
• You’ll run sp_BlitzCache to find the queries causing your top wait types, using my favorite parameters for deeper diagnosis and trending
• You’ll run sp_BlitzIndex to diagnose the most urgent indexing issues specifically related to your top wait types
• You’ll write up a report to hand off to the rest of your team about what you learned about your server today, and what actions everyone needs to take in order to see a performance boost

Throughout the day, as you have questions about the data you’re seeing, you can post screenshots in the class’s Slack channel and get advice from me (and the rest of the students!) You’ll learn not just from your own questions, but also from the data that the other students are sharing about challenges they’re facing, too.

Registration is open now – but seating is limited in this class because I want to make sure to have plenty of time to answer individual attendee questions about their particular server’s issues.

For those of you with the Live Class Season Pass, Level 2 Bundle, or Level 3 Bundle, registration is of course completely free for you, since you get access to all of my live classes while you’re subscribed.

If you only got the Level 1 Bundle and you’re feeling buyer’s regret for not going bigger, good news: as of today, if you go to the Level 2 Bundle or Level 3 Bundle pages, you get $295 off during our Black Friday month sales too. I got tired of fielding emails that said, “Hey, I’m really wishing I’d have gone for that Level 2 – it’s just too good to pass up,” so now you can do self-service upgrades. Enjoy!

Update Nov 13: well, that was fast! The first one already sold out, so I added a date in January. If that one sells out, I won’t add another one until after the April class date.