A recent change made to Redgate Monitor to add a new alert for VLF count. This post looks at the change.
This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts
Tracking Virtual Log Files
Virtual Log Files (VLF) are sections inside of your physical log file (.ldf). These have no fixed size or number per file, but there can be many. The architecture of the log is explained in this doc and it varies according to a number of factors.
That doc also explains there are issues with too many VLFs inside of a log file. There are plenty of other posts about this (Brent Ozar, Kimberly Trip) and it is somethin you want to keep track of.
Redgate Monitor changes and grows every week with new releases and one of the resent releases (14.0.41) included a new alert for VLFs.
To configure this, select the gear icon in the upper right of Redgate Monitor.
On the configuration page, select the Alert settings. This will bring you to the details for your alerts.
There are a number of items on the Alert Settings page, but scroll down to the bottom of the SQL Server Alerts section. The Virtual log file count is the last alert.
The default setting is to raise multiple alerts here. The settings are:
- low: 100
- medium: 300
- high: 1000
These may or may not be appropriate for your system, and for me, I don’t know I’ve ever had time to worry about this and I might disable a low level alert and only have two, but you can decide what’s important to you.
The important thing is that if you worry about VLFs in your environment, you can get alerted and track this over time.
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