What should I ask my DBA in order to diagnose a slow application? I am working in the IT department of an industrial firm. The IT department is a handful of people, mainly project managers, and everything else is outsourced.

I have been managing a project, where a third party application has been bought off the shelf, and deployed by the vendor, but to be maintained on our own.

It consists of a central application server, connected to an SQL Server database, and a dozen heavy clients, all on our premises, on the same VLAN.

Most of the time, it runs fine, however, sometimes, when accessing records from the DB, the application is awfully slow.

I have been asking our DBA (outsourced) what is wrong, but have been responded by something along the lines of "Please ask me to do something with the DB, and I'll gracefully do it".

Hence the question, in a situation of sporadic sluggishness like this, which technical actions should I ask of my DBA to make progress on the case?

Please monitor the performance of the DB is apparently too vague, and they expect something along the lines of 'Enable this performance counter for that long' and so on...
While a good DBA can find out a lot on his own, it never hurts to give a lot of information.


Which application you're using. If you know server/db ect give that as well.
Test/Prod
When the issue occurs, eg. I open this form and it's slow, or when I do this...
What's slow and what's fast. For some applications it can be perfectly acceptable to wait 1-2 seconds, while others have to perform near instantly. It can often be really easy to get a first bump in performance, but after that it takes a lot longer to make it just a little bit faster
Which login you're using  


Especially if he's external + perhaps a junior it never hurts to just give him all you've got.

After that it's mostly up to the DBA to setup monitoring.


Log WhoIsActive to a table
Use the build in query store if version is 2016 or higher
Buy a third party tool, eg. SentryOne/Red gate monitor


After he setup monitoring you could also mail him "I'm having issues right now, could you see if you notice anything special?" Do not expect him to reply right away, but it gives him a window that he can check later where he knows the issue occurred.