Essentials 2007 and SQL
SQL Server is a very sophisticated technology that requires expert tuning, maintenance and monitoring. SQL Server is used by many applications and services and must be stable or its dependant products will be unreliable. Very large IT infrastructures have dedicated teams for each element of the infrastructure. In smaller companies a dedicated DBA is rarely an option. Dedicated tools are needed to aid the generalist administrator.
SQL server offers:
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End-to-end visibility into mission critical applications
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Faster problem resolution using SQL Server knowledge
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Increased DBA productivity
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Automate routine management tasks
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Consolidated view of distributed servers and applications
Essentials 2007 helps prevent outages and ease the tasks associated with running an environment dependent on SQL Server. Essentials gives intuitive access to common actions specific to SQL Server available via context sensitive action options as well as simple wizard based tools for tasks such as deployment of software and patches. SQL support in Essentials 2007 includes:
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Patch Management of Operating System Updates to SQL Server and clients
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Deploy SQL Server specific product updates
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Inventory of software and hardware
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Centralized Error collection
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Complete monitoring of the SQL Server Infrastructure including the SQL Server host OS, the SQL Server service and any services SQL depends on, for example directory services
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10 SQL Specific reports in addition to more general Windows reports
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Automated daily health report
The SQL Server management pack provides rules for detecting and alerting critical events in SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005. The management pack’s goal is to reduce or prevent SQL Server outages by proactively managing SQL Server instances in the areas of configuration, performance, and security.This management pack can alert on many types of SQL Server critical conditions including, deadlock problems, blocking issues, and SQL Server becoming unavailable. Included in the alert is guidance for resolving the issue with configuration advice or likely problem resolution information based on the type of alert. Additionally, the most commonly monitored performance statistics for SQL Server with predefined thresholds are also defined in the management pack as performance rules. These default thresholds can be modified, but they are a good starting point for monitoring performance on a SQL Server instance. It is also possible to add more performance thresholds if there are additional metrics that are important and need to be monitored closely.
The SQL management pack has a very rich application model of the SQL elements including instances, databases, file groups, files, agent jobs and SQL Roles which the discovery component of the management pack inspects and actually looks for specific objects within the SQL environment. The aspects you choose to monitor and the actions to perform are fully customizable to your requirements. The Management Pack event analysis monitors all the key aspects of the SQL Server environment, for example clustering, log shipping, backup, SQL Server Agent and as we mentioned earlier the SQL roles are discovered and so any roles the SQL Server is running are fully monitored, for example replication. In addition to the overall views of the SQL health in-depth views of database, database engine, reporting services, integration services etc are all available.
Monitoring is based around:
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Availability – Synthetic transaction connects confirming service available along with 400 SQL events that affect availability status
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Performance – Items such as caching ratio, user connections, processor utilization per instance, database and log size/growth
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Configuration – Analyzes the SQL Best Practices and identifies where configuration does not match
Another very useful feature that will appeal to both SQL novice users and experience DBA’s are the new ways to access functions to aid in running SQL. If the Database engine is selected in the Actions pane of the MMC the actions related to the database are displayed. Not only does Essentials reveal what is happening, it gives actions for the component that has focus in the tool. This applies to everything, if we select a just a computer and not a component we get options to list active sessions, processes etc. This is very much a management solution and not just monitoring.
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