sp_BlitzFirst® Result: Low Page Life Expectancy According to sp_BlitzFirst®‘s diagnostics, Page Life Expectancy is under 5 minutes right now. I'm monitoring this using SCOM. On seemingly random days i see Page Life Expectancy drop off a cliff from 42,000+ sec to 200-300 sec for a few minutes. Alert: SQL DB 2008 Engine Page Life Expectancy is too low Source: GENERAL Path: VS02 Last modified by: System Last modified time: 4/4/2017 7:54:07 AM Alert description: Page Life Expectancy of SQL instance “GENERAL” on computer “VS02” is too low. Group "SQL Servers Page Life Expectancy High" with threshold of … 0 Share Tweet Share 0 Share. Sudden drop of the page life expectandy but don’t panic yet! Group "SQL Servers Page Life Expectancy Low" with threshold of 100. I have configured a SQL2016 failover cluster on Server 2016. One of them is not used at all yet, one just hosts one database that is rarely used and the third is hosting some production databases that are being used. There are no patterns detected so far. PLE is a measure of, on average, how long (in seconds) will a page remain in memory without being accessed, after which point it is removed. Page Life Expectancy. By Microsoft Team March 2, 2016 Database Administration & Monitoring, Development & Performance No Comments. A couple of weeks ago, I had an interesting discussion with one of my customer about the page life expectancy (aka PLE). Page Life Expectancy is the number of seconds the average page of data has been in the buffer pool. This is a metric that we want to be higher as we want our important data to remain in the buffer cache for as long as possible. If the threshold needs to be increased for a selection of servers, then again create a group to hold that specific server list and a suitable override for that group. Keeping the data in memory gives SQL Server quicker access to it instead of making the long, slow trip to disk. The setup is configured with 3 SQL server instances. E.g. This means SQL Server can only keep data pages in memory for that many seconds after reading those pages in from storage. See “alert context” tab for more details. The VM has 16GB of memory with max server memory in SQL set to 8GB. It's a SQL Server 2008 R2 running on a Windows Server 2008R2 VM on top of VMware 5.0. E.g. Fixing Page Life Expectancy (PLE) ... Before we get too deep into it, lets make sure we’re on the same page on a couple things.