KPACK: SQL Capacity Monitoring

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1 KPACK: SQL Capacity Monitoring Microsoft SQL database capacity monitoring is extremely critical for enterprise high availability deployments. Although built-in SQL tools and certain 3 rd party monitoring systems provide extensive reporting and monitoring capabilities but fail to bridge the gap into the storage domain. A professional enterprise SQL deployment will utilize a multi-mount point system and span databases across these mount points to distribute I/O load. This setup coupled with expanding files, table partioning, and shared mount points. Such a setup requires a complicated capacity analysis that examines the database storage utilization, file group configuration, database file properties and growth patterns along with mount point allocations and disk free space. Kashef SQL Capacity monitoring KPack provides this capability easily by collecting the required information then projecting the number of days remaining until a given database will become full. The projection is done using a simulation of how SQL server itself distributes growth amongst files. This KPack supports Microsoft SQL 2005 databases and above. The result of the analysis is a detailed online HTML report that lists the database and mounts points along with projected number of days remaining until capacity is reached. The report can then be drilled-down to see the information at the file group level, followed by file level details. The mount point listing can also be drilled down to display the database files allocated to each mount point. A sample report is shown on the following page. Further technical specifications are as follows: Database Information is collected using queries against internal SQL Management Views Volume disk details including mount points is collected using WMI queries File growth details are collected using file backup data stored in built-in SQL tables. As such, projections assume that full backups are performed at least once a week on the target databases. Projection is done assuming a linear growth and approximated based on interpolation of past 1 month of backup data. Analysis takes into account multiple SQL instances on the same physical server. Thresholds can be defined to drive critical and warning level indicators on the report. All aspects of the data collection, analysis and reporting can be customized

2 Drilldown for Group, File and Mount Point Details File Group Details File Details Mount Point Reference

3 KPACK: Basic Windows Server Monitoring Microsoft Windows servers require a standard set of basic resources for optimal operation. This includes processor, memory, storage and disk I/O resources. A small corporate data center employs at least 20 windows servers. Newer datacenters employing cloud-based designs employ a larger number reaching the hundreds of physical and virtual servers. Monitoring such a setup in real-time can be a monumental task. The Kashef Windows monitoring KPack tracks key indicators from Windows servers, performs the required analysis and then presents information about the entire datacenter in a NOC friendly and highly relevant manner. Information is collected about CPU utilization, free disk space on the OS partition, available memory and disk queue length, list of processes running along with the CPU and memory utilization of each one. The health of the server is then determined based on comparison of collected normalized values against userdefined thresholds. Health panels are then shown on the various charts on this page. CPU Utilization By Server Critical Health Indicators CPU Utilization By Process List of Processes with Memory Utilization

4 KPACK: Web Server Monitoring Microsoft based datacenter depend heavily on IIS application servers and ASP.Net. An enterprise distributed environment typically employs farms of windows servers for each architectural tier including front-end servers, middle-tier servers and back-end service providers. The simplest setup employs at least three tiers but larger datacenters will have numerous tiers with more than 10 servers in each one. Detecting web server issues requires real-time information regarding IIS key indicators and ASP.Net requests statistics and then presenting this information in a concise matter where issues can quickly be highlighted and identified. The Kashef Web Server KPack collects key health indicators from IIS/ASP.Net servers, passes them through a batch analysis engine then provides the information for each tier separately and provides the ability to drill-down into server level information. An ASP.Net web server is deemed healthy if there are no queued requests. Middle Tier Server Health Panel Detailed Server Details (Queuing, Requests, ASP 1.1 Stats, ASP 2+ Stats) IIS Connections Per Server on Middle Tier Total Current Middle Tier Requests by ASP App Average ASP Request Latency by Tier

5 KPACK: IIS Real-Time Log File Monitoring Microsoft Internet Information Server log files contain a wealth of information regarding the availability and performance of any web site. Monitoring these logs files is traditionally done offline using log analysis tools to extract general trends and utilization reports. However, monitoring these files in real-time provides extreme additional value in supporting the NOC real-time monitoring needs. The IIS log file KPack leverages Kashef s ability to attach and parse log files dynamically as content is added. The result is a wealth of information related to the hosted applications, current load on the server, distributions of load across a web farms, page level statistics and Client IP oriented statistics. Further, with a certain level of customization, the client-ip based statistics can be visualized on an interactive map. Main Display Panel with Page Request per Minute globally and by server Slowest pages and their response time based on IIS Log Field Time-taken Real-time display of requests by location. Below is an sample implementation of requests from different Bank Branches. Site tree hierarchy view with real-time display of page requests per minute.

6 KPACK: Synthetic Transaction Monitoring The most advanced form of application monitoring employs computer agents that perform actual transactions against the target system. This is termed synthetic transaction monitoring and provides information on actual application availability and performance from an end-user perspective. Typically a set of indicative inquiry-only screen transactions are selected for this type of monitoring. One extra variation is to employ these agents in multiple locations in order to incorporate and monitor the network health dimension. For example, a typical mid-sized bank will monitor its online banking service from locations inside the bank s network, over a DSL connection in the bank s home country, from an overseas monitoring server. Kashef support synthetic transaction monitoring through its extensive scripting capability where the full power of the.net framework is available for simulating screen flow transactions against HTML and non HTML clients. For remote monitoring, WextWise offers a free KPack hosting service that can be used to monitor internet facing sites. The remote site is currently deployed in Eastern United States. Total Transaction Latency as monitored from different Locations Summary Health Indicator by Location Multi-Location Latency display with Transaction Breakdown