Detailed XEvents Tracing

Impact of Detailed XEvents Tracing

Extended Events (XEvents) can be used to troubleshoot various issues. If your server is very active with many users, you should carefully evaluate the impact of tracing. Many events are produced at statement level. In other words, for each statement, the events will be produced. If your code generates lots of small statements (e.g. cursors, scalar UDF), these events can generate significant overhead on large systems with many users.

Here are a few example events

• query_pre_execution_showplan
• query_post_execution_showplan
• query_post_compilation_showplan
• lock_acquired
• sql_statement_starting
• sql_statement_completed
• sp_statement_starting
• sp_statement_completed

Pssdiag captures active XEvent sessions/events in a file called <your_servername>_Profiler Traces_Startup.OUT so that you can examine for more details.