The Extended Events session named “x” could not be found. Make sure the session exist and is started.

One day I opened SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio) and wanted to check the Extended Events Session that captured Timeouts. To find out how to capture Timeouts with Extended Events, you may want to read my article “How To Capture Query Timeout With Extended Events“.

When I right-click on “Extended Events” called Timeout, and then click “Watch Live Data”, I received an error as follows.

The error was meaningless, but as a result of the research I learned that this error might be because the user’s default database is not a master. So I right-click on my login(Its sysadmin) and click Properties, and I see that the default database is the master from the General tab.

Although my default database is master, I was getting this error. The reason for the problem was that when connecting to SSMS, there was a database other than the master database in the Connect To Database section.

Click on the Options tab while connecting to SSMS as follows and on the Connection Properties tab select the “Default” in the Connect to database section. The problem will be solved.