Other Articles

SQL Database – Monitor Memory Utilization

This check ensures that memory utilization for Azure SQL Databases is actively monitored. Monitoring memory usage helps identify memory pressure, inefficient queries, and resource constraints that can impact database performance and availability.

Check Details

  • Resource: SQL Server / SQL Database
  • Check: Monitor SQL Databases Memory Utilization
  • Risk: Without memory utilization monitoring, memory pressure may go undetected, leading to slow query execution, increased latency, throttling, or database instability.

Remediation via Azure Portal

  1. Log in to the Azure Portal. Azure Portal dashboard
  2. Navigate to Azure SQL Database.
  3. Select the target SQL Database. SQL databases list
  4. From the left-hand menu, go to MonitoringMetrics. SQL database metrics menu
  5. In the metrics configuration:
    • Select Memory percentage or Memory usage as the metric
    • Choose an appropriate time range
    • Analyze memory consumption trends
    SQL database memory utilization metrics
  6. Configure Alerts on memory utilization to get notified when usage exceeds defined thresholds. Memory utilization alert configuration

Monitoring via Azure Monitor (Recommended)

Azure SQL Databases automatically emit memory utilization metrics to Azure Monitor. To ensure continuous visibility, configure metric alerts or integrate with Log Analytics for advanced diagnostics.

  1. Open Azure Cloud Shell. Azure Cloud Shell
  2. Create a memory utilization alert rule:
    az monitor metrics alert create \
      --name HighMemoryAlert \
      --resource-group <resource-group-name> \
      --scopes <sql-database-resource-id> \
      --condition "avg memory_percent > 80" \
      --window-size 5m \
      --evaluation-frequency 1m \
      --severity 2
    

This alert triggers when average memory utilization exceeds 80%, enabling proactive troubleshooting before performance degradation occurs.