Querying deadlock information XE

One of the problems with dealing with deadlocks is first of all you have to be able to capture them and have the right trace flags turned on (-T1222) and then you would need to read through the SQL Server error log and try to piece together all the node information.

There is another way. By default the system_health extended events has an event for xml_deadlock_report.

This means that SQL Server should be capturing the deadlock graph in XML.

Then you should be able to query the XEvent like this:

SELECT XEvent.query('(event/data/value/deadlock)[1]') AS DeadlockGraph

FROM (

SELECT XEvent.query('.') AS XEvent

FROM (

SELECT CAST(target_data AS XML) AS TargetData

FROM sys.dm_xe_session_targets st

INNER JOIN sys.dm_xe_sessions s ON s.address = st.event_session_address

WHERE s.NAME = 'system_health'

AND st.target_name = 'ring_buffer'

) AS Data

CROSS APPLY TargetData.nodes('RingBufferTarget/event[@name="xml_deadlock_report"]') AS XEventData(XEvent)

) AS source;