Limiting sp_whoisactive output

Question

All,

I am currently putting together a knowledge based article that we can hand to our helpdesk to run through in order to do some preliminary troubleshooting or information gathering. One of the things I did was create the ability (thanks to Brent, https://www.brentozar.com/askbrent) to provide non-sysadmin's the ability to run sp_whoisactive to output some details they could provide to dbas like myself in the ticket. The problem I am running into is I want to exclude "sql_text" from results, but I cannot seem to figure out how?

I understand you have the ability to filter the output when it goes to a table (@output_column_list param) but I am not having the agents export it to a table. Initially, I was under the impression that the "@output_column_list" was where I could adjust the columns I wanted to see in the results, but it is clearly only a parameter used to filter the output to a table. In my desperate attempt, I tried the above parameter anyways and would leave out "sql_text" from the output, but all that did was reposition the column order.

EXEC sp_WhoIsActive @output_column_list = '[dd%][session_id][login_name][wait_info][tasks][tran_log%][cpu%][temp%][block%][reads%][writes%][context%][physical%][query_plan][locks][%]'

Therefore, I want them to be able to copy the contents (with headers) to an excel sheet to attach. The less complicated work, the better as I fear if I provide the help desk with too much info it will confuse them.

Am I missing something? They will not have the ability to run any jobs or even look at logs, so their rights are already VERY limited.

Answer 1

There's an error in your command. If you remove the [%] at the end, you'll get the correct output.

Current: EXEC sp_WhoIsActive @output_column_list = '[dd%][session_id][login_name][wait_info][tasks][tran_log%][cpu%][temp%][block%][reads%][writes%][context%][physical%][query_plan][locks][%]'

Should be: EXEC sp_WhoIsActive @output_column_list = '[dd%][session_id][login_name][wait_info][tasks][tran_log%][cpu%][temp%][block%][reads%][writes%][context%][physical%][query_plan][locks]'

As a side note: if you want to get the query plan, and associated locks (since you've got them in your column list), you'll need to use the @get_plans and @get_locks parameters in combination with the output list.