4. OTHER MICROSOFT TOOLS FOR MANAGING SQL SERVER

This section describes manageability tools for SQL Server other than those included with the product. There is a significant industry in creating tools that help in the development and management of databases and servers, and Microsoft has invested heavily in enterprise deployment, configuration, and monitoring tools for the entire application platform, including SQL Server. Several years ago, Microsoft defined a set of acceptance criteria for all server-based products, stating they must ship with a monitoring management pack (originally called Microsoft Operations Manager, or MOM, and now renamed System Center Operations Manager, or SCOM), which means customers can add application-specific monitoring to their monitoring platform.

Since the SQL Server database platform has become more mature, many customers focus on reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) and delivering better value to the business by improving service levels and reducing deployment times for new services. The benefit driving more widespread adoption of these technologies is breadth of coverage. For example, an increasing number of customers are deploying Hyper-V in some capacity within the data center, and it is very easy to add monitoring and alerting via the System Center Operations Manager.

The next step in the evolution of the data center is the private cloud concept. Typically these deployments are created and standardized using a virtualization platform. Compared to the traditional server purchase and provisioning cycle, this can drastically reduce both the cost per server (or virtual machine) and the provisioning time required.

4.1 System Center Advisor

The System Center Advisor (SCA) is a cloud-based subscription service that provides configuration reviews and feedback. Part of the System Center manageability product family, it offers detailed customer-specific guidance based on server configuration, and leverages best practices and field knowledge from the Microsoft Customer Service and Support (CSS) organization.

The tool is intended to consolidate the features of other products such as Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) and the Best Practice Analyzer (BPA), and to close the gap between best practice guidance and advice provided by CSS. As a result, SCA provides customers with specific, actionable recommendations.

SCA supports SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2012, running on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. You can find out more and try it out here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-in/server-cloud/system-center/advisor-overview.aspx.

There is also a Microsoft KB article to be aware of for SQL Server 2012 which can found here:

How to configure SQL Server 2012 to allow for System Center Advisor monitoring: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2667175.

It’s important to understand under which circumstances you would use SCA, as approaching the tool with accurate expectations is more likely to result in a satisfactory experience. Although SCA does provide a lot of useful information, it isn’t a performance analysis tool or a live monitoring tool, and it has no real-time data capture or alerting features. Here’s a summary of the environments that can be monitored at the time of writing:

• Windows Server 2008 and later
  • Active Directory
  • Hyper-V Host
• General operating system
• SQL Server 2008 and later
  • SQL Engine
• Exchange Server 2010
• SharePoint Server 2010

SCA functionality is based on periodic configuration snapshots, taken over time. It reports configuration changes and missing or new updates. Note that SCA will not monitor CPU utilization, disk space, memory, or any other operational monitoring counters or thresholds. For these purposes, SCA can be used to supplement any operational monitoring, rather than replace such tools.

It supports an evolving knowledge base, acquired from the field experience of Microsoft CSS, supporting SQL Server deployments. The SCA knowledge base will expand to include rules (recommendations) for service packs, cumulative updates, Quick Fix Engineering (QFE) releases, and configuration changes that resolve new issues — identified and resolved after a product is in the in-life product life cycle phase. The recommendations provided are far more specialized than anything that can be provided through traditional software update models such as Windows Server Update Service (WSUS), which does not contain the configuration view or logic to determine applicability of updates with the same level of sophistication provided by SCA.

Topology

Although the SCA is a cloud-based service, two components require on-premise installation. However, this process is streamlined and relatively non-intrusive. Two roles must be deployed on-premise: Gateway and Agent.

Each environment requires a Gateway that uses certificate-based authentication to upload data to the web service. The Gateway collects and uploads monitoring data captured from each Agent. The Gateway must be in the same security zone (Active Directory domain or trusted domain) as the servers to be monitored. Additionally, the Gateway must have Internet connectivity to complete the data upload to the web service.

Each server that will be monitored with SCA requires an Agent installation. If the server is not in the same domain as the Gateway, the Gateway and certificate must also be installed on the server. Additionally, the Agents must have network communication with the Gateway. The data collection process runs approximately every 24 hours; once the deployment is complete, you can check the following day to ensure that the server is displayed correctly in the web console.

Reporting

The alerting and administration for SCA is accessed via the web portal found at http://www.systemcenteradvisor.com. The web console provides an easy-to-use overview of the environment’s current status, using colors to indicate alert severity (critical, warning, without alert) and specifying the area affected (SQL Server and Windows), as shown in Figure 11. The Overview page also shows server status, which displays any nonreporting Agents.

FIGURE 11

Displayed in the left-hand navigation area are five additional tabs, which are summarized in Table 6.

TABLE 6: SCA Home Page Icons

In addition to using the web console for monitoring, SCA can also be configured to send e-mail notifications of new SCA alerts.