You have a server that has SQL Server 2012 installed. You need to identify which parallel execution plans are running in serial. Which tool should you use?

Data Profile Viewer is an SSIS tool used to inspect output from the Data Profiling task, and has no capability to inspect SQL Server query execution plans.

Database Engine Tuning Advisor analyzes workload traces to recommend indexes and statistics, but does not monitor or report on runtime parallel plan serial fallback.

Performance Monitor tracks aggregate system-level counters such as CPU and memory usage but cannot identify individual query execution plans or their parallelism behavior.

Extended Events includes the degree_of_parallelism event, which records the actual DOP used at runtime, allowing administrators to detect cases where an optimizer-chosen parallel plan falls back to serial execution. It provides low-overhead, granular plan-level metadata that other tools cannot surface. Sessions can be filtered and targeted precisely to capture only relevant parallelism-related events.