What is Live Session ?

You want to know what session is actually blocking your server or you need to know when your backup will finish ? So Live session is for you !

Maybe you already use sp_who2 or something similar, but in my humble opinion, Live Session is more convenient and easier.

With Live Session, you will see all actives sessions at the current point in time and all these informations :

  • Session Id : id of the session
  • Blocking Session Id : should be NULL. If you have an id in this column then your query is locked by this one. Don’t panic, locks are normal in SQL Server ! Just try to limit them
  • Login : login used by the session
  • Host Name : the client workstation executing the query
  • Program Name : name of the application executing the query. You can configure this name in your connectionstring.
  • Client Interface Name : the driver used to communicate with the server
  • Database : the database context
  • Logical Read : the number of logical reads of the query
  • Writes : the number of logical reads of the query
  • CPU Time : the CPU time in milliseconds used by the query
  • Duration : duration in minutes. Basically, this is a DATEDIFF between the start time column and the current datetime
  • Command : the current type of command. For example SELECT, INSERT, BACKUP DATABASE, DBCC, etc…
  • Status : status of the request. Available status are Background, Running, Runnable, Sleeping, Suspended.
  • Percent Complete : only available for few commands. Very useful in case of backup, restore, DBCC, etc…
  • Start Time : the time when the request arrived
  • Open Transaction Count : number of open transactions for this query
  • Query : The text of the sql query
  • Execution plan : Contains the compile-time Showplan representation of the query execution plan. The plan is opened with SSMS or in XML. This is an optional information because it can decrease performance of Live Session. You must enable it with the checkbox at the top of the datagrid.

Live Session

How Kankuru gets the data ?

All data are collected with KMO from master database.

This tool uses the method GetLiveSession from KServer in KMO.

The query will use these specific DMV :

Usage

You can access to Live session directly from the menu after selecting your server or from Dashboard.

Live Session Open

You can decide if you want to show system sessions and if you want to get execution plans with the checkbox.

live Session Checkbox

When you select a session, you have 3 options :

  • you can kill a sessionLive Session Kill
  • show the query which is blocking your sessionLive Session Blocking
  • open the execution plan in SSMS