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Real-World Incident Case Study – Peak Coordinated with dev team →
Traffic DB Contention optimized SQL queries & transaction
Situation: handling.
During a peak traffic period, Grafana Result:
triggered high latency alerts. PagerDuty Latency normalized in minutes,
escalated to the on-call engineer. downtime avoided.
Task: Added deadlock-specific alerts in
Identify and fix the root cause without monitoring stack.
downtime or affecting customer Enhanced pre-deployment load
experience. testing to catch similar issues earlier.
Action:
Checked Azure Monitor → One-Page DB & Distributed App
CPU/memory were stable. Troubleshooting SOP
Investigated Azure SQL metrics →
query execution times spiked. 1️⃣ Monitoring — Proactive Detection
Used Splunk → found repeated Tools: Grafana, Prometheus, Azure
deadlock errors in logs. Monitor, SSMS, SolarWinds
Applied OpenTelemetry distributed Why: Early detection of anomalies before
tracing → found a specific impact.
microservice creating contention. Actions:
Rolled back latest microservice Track CPU, memory, query execution
deployment via Helm → contention times, deadlocks, blocking sessions
dropped immediately. Set baseline performance metrics
Configure alerts via PagerDuty /
Opsgenie
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Azure SQL:
2️⃣ Alert Response — Initial Triage Query Performance Insight → Top
Tools: Azure Service Map, Grafana queries
Dashboards, SSMS Activity Monitor Intelligent Insights & auto-tuning
Why: Narrow down affected services & recommendations
scope. DMVs for waits, blocking
Actions:
Verify service health in Azure Monitor 4️⃣ Remediation — Apply Fix
Compare current metrics vs baseline Distributed Apps: Rollback via Helm,
Identify if issue is DB, app, or infra- scale services, disable features via feature
related flags
On-Prem SQL: Kill blocking sessions, add
3️⃣ Diagnosis — Root Cause Analysis indexes, optimize queries, tune TempDB
Distributed Apps: Azure SQL: Apply safe index
Logs → Splunk / ELK Stack recommendations, temporarily scale
Tracing → OpenTelemetry, Jaeger compute, optimize slow queries
Identify slow endpoints or high error
rates 5️⃣ Postmortem — Prevention
On-Prem SQL: Document RCA in Confluence / Jira
SSMS Activity Monitor & Add targeted alerts (e.g., deadlocks >
sp_whoisactive for X)
blocking/deadlocks Improve pre-deployment load testing
Execution plans for query tuning (JMeter, k6)
DMVs (sys.dm_exec_requests) for Add chaos testing to simulate failures
active query inspection