Go Beyond Basic Up/Down Monitoring

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1 Go Beyond Basic Up/Down Monitoring Extending the Value of SCOM with Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise and Foglight Performance Analysis for SQL Server

2 Introduction Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) allows IT professionals to manage and monitor Windows and Linux systems within an Active Directory farm. SCOM is more a platform than a domainspecific product; its core functionality is to provide overall health alerting of Windows servers and Windows services running on a given server. This allows IT professionals to build and use SCOM for managing the specific topologies within an organization. While SCOM is great at telling you whether your server is healthy or not, it doesn t provide much beyond that. SCOM does come with a significant number of management packs, but they are intended as templates to be modified to meet your organization s specific needs. Customizing SCOM for a specific domain, such as SQL Server, requires the DBA to invest significant time, and provides only basic health monitoring of SQL Server. In the end, when there is trouble with a database, the DBA needs tools other than SCOM alone to effectively troubleshoot and diagnose performance issues. This paper explores SQL Server monitoring available in SCOM as well as some of its limitations when it comes to really understanding and managing database performance. We show how to go beyond simple up/down monitoring with predictive performance diagnostics and provide best practices for monitoring and troubleshooting your SQL Server environment to help you maximize your investment in SCOM. This paper offers simple methodologies and tips to: Quickly address database issues and proactively manage SQL Server performance Troubleshoot SQL Server performance issues in real time and historically Drill into database health to quickly find the root cause of an issue and make corrections

3 How SCOM and Spotlight View SQL Server SCOM s View of SQL Server SCOM provides cross-server health monitoring, offering a high-level view of performance for all services and applications running on a Windows Server. SCOM treats SQL Server as just another Windows Service to monitor. The following screenshot illustrates the level of data available from SCOM for any given Windows Server running SQL Server: Spotlight s View of SQL Server Spotlight on SQL Server complements SCOM by delivering the level of detail DBAs need to really understand and resolve performance issues. Overall SQL Server Topology View At a high level, Spotlight provides a detailed view of the entire server topology and shows enterprise health at a glance, including information on the top alarms experienced by individual instances.

4 And Spotlight s instance view provides real-time monitoring and identifies SQL server instance health at a glance. SQL Server instances running on a VMWare guest OS image show the amount of CPU overhead to identify the impact of virtualization on SQL Server performance. Spotlight on SQL Server: The Value-Add You may be thinking if Spotlight can monitor operating systems and databases, why do I need SCOM? SCOM and Spotlight are different but complementary tools. A complete Spotlight implementation provides overall monitoring across multiple technologies (e.g., Java,.NET, virtual or physical servers, databases, networks, etc.) and captures the experience of users interacting with those applications. SCOM, on the other hand, has unique functionality around management of configuration and general servicing of hardware and software found on Windows servers and clients. Because SCOM is deployed as an Active Directory domain controller, SCOM has operational capabilities beyond an application performance management (APM) tool. However, because SCOM is primarily focused on the day-to-day management of Windows Servers, it provides only a simplified view of SQL Server health even though SQL Server databases are critical to most business applications. Spotlight provides the essential tools DBAs need to manage SQL database performance and drill down into problems in real time. For example, if there is a deadlock event, SCOM will simply tell you when and where it happened. Foglight Performance Analysis will tell you why and what caused the issue in the database. While SCOM can give the IT operations specialist an overall view of server health, it doesn t provide functionality for real-time drilling into problems. SCOM does not show detailed information about database domain issues in an at-a-glance view. Spotlight provides deep SQL Server collections that allow for easy troubleshooting of database specific problems. System Center users can deploy management packs for Microsoft SQL Server, which provides a mechanism for basic health monitoring of SQL Server Services. SCOM does not provide query-level information about SQL Server events. When an issue impacts application performance and a DBA lacks an advanced workload analysis tool like Spotlight, he has to use scripts to manually find troubled SQL queries, which is cumbersome and time-consuming. Let s look at some specific ways in which Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise and Foglight Performance Analysis for SQL Server augment the value of SCOM.

5 Day-to-Day Monitoring With SCOM: You get only a heads-up message: Healthy/Critical/Warning. With Foglight Performance Analysis: You get real-time information about performance against baselines, current trends, current top resource utilization, and workload, which enables deep workload analysis. Database Health Root-Cause Analysis With SCOM: You get an alert with information about the event, and then you have to turn to custom code or another tool to troubleshoot the problem. Even with custom code, it will be hard to understand all the issues affecting the database before and after the deadlock event. Deadlocks: A SCOM alert provides only basic information about a deadlock event. With Foglight Performance Analysis for SQL Server: You can review the deadlock event and compare the performance of the server for symptoms of an issue before the event. This provides key information for correct diagnosis and repair. Query Performance With SCOM: SCOM provides no visibility at all into query performance. With Foglight Performance Analysis for SQL Server: Foglight gives you an industry-leading tool for multi-dimensional analysis of performance at the query level.

6 Foglight makes it easy to analyze query performance. Troubleshooting Issues - Real Time and Historic Having a handle on database performance is one of the most important aspects of a DBA s job. Having a better understanding of the environment enables the DBA to find and fix performance issues faster and proactively plan for and address potential issues. DBAs need to know the answers to questions like these: What is the day-to-day utilization of the servers? Which applications use the most disk space? Which applications use the most memory? With SCOM: With SCOM alone monitoring the environment, those questions are going to remain unanswered. Some of the implications of not having a full clear picture of your monitored environment are: Reacting to problems only after they happen Not having the data to do root-cause analysis Not understanding a workload s impact on the topology Not being able to stay on top of pending administration tasks With Foglight Performance Analysis for SQL Server: With Foglight PA, the DBA can spend less time and effort reacting to problems and more time proactively managing workloads, which results in greater efficiencies and better utilization of server resources. Change Tracking Many times, the development team writes and deploys code with only basic unit and integration testing; no work is done to check the performance of the new code or to optimize it and very little effort is made to track the operational impact of the code s deployment. With Foglight Performance Analysis, each change whether it is a schema change or a stored procedure change is captured and tracked. With this data in hand, a DBA can see the impact of system changes on performance. With SCOM: There is no change tracking in SCOM.

7 With Foglight Performance Analysis for SQL Server: A user can identify changes to server or database configuration and to SQL plans and database objects, and align them with performance. Comparison of Performance Why should we care about performance comparisons? Comparing application performance over time or against performance measures sometimes uncovers hidden performance demons. With SCOM: SCOM has no capability for performance comparisons. With Foglight Performance Analysis for SQL Server: You can select two periods of time and multiple dimensions to understand how the performance for a given workload has changed over time. Conclusion With SCOM alone, the average DBA would need to write complex scripts to create a picture of server issues or they can use Spotlight on SQL Server and Foglight for SQL Server. For most DBAs, knowing what the issue is and how to solve it is very challenging, but with Spotlight, it s easy. Spotlight provides unrivaled monitoring and performance tools that go far beyond what SCOM can do. You could use SCOM to monitor the server infrastructure while using Spotlight to do troubleshooting and diagnosis for databases. Key takeaways: SCOM is a great way to get high-level performance information about your SQL Server environment; however, by design, SCOM does not have in-depth, domain-specific features. Spotlight and Foglight can help. With non-stop data collection and instant metric-sensitive alerts, Spotlight on SQL Server ensures optimal database performance. Built-in expert guidance, intuitive interfaces, and easy-to-follow workflows help you speed through your work. Plus, with Foglight for SQL Server you get automated performance analysis and an enterprise-level view of database health. Learn More: Spotlight on SQL Server Foglight Performance Analysis for SQL Server

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