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How to identify a failover event ...

  • July 26, 2007 at 4:31 pm

    #63084

    Guys,

    We have active/passive cluster set up.  There are 2 machines in a cluster.  If machine 1 fails, machine 2 takes over, with no fail back.

    We had an issue recently - there was a failover, but we never knew about it since SQL Server was working with no problem, until some point in time.  This point in time occurred when we began to run out of disk space on a disk to where we back up db and transaction log.  Apparently we did not compress the drive on the 'to fail over to' machine.

    Can anyone share, from their experience, how one can identify and alert if a failover occurs?

    Thanks a lot

  • July 26, 2007 at 6:26 pm

    #722737

    Here is my penny.

    In an active/passive cluster, SQL Server Services and SQLAgent Services on each node is set manually. You can add your script to sent alert when a service stops or starts.

  • July 27, 2007 at 6:13 am

    #722829

    It is also wise to create some general monitoring scripts to review on a daily basis (putting these in reporting services makes you look really cool to your boss as well ). As part of that consider something to check instance uptime and report on that. You will see any failovers here and allow you to start actively understanding the reasons and what potential risks there are in staying in the failed-over state.

    David

    @SQLTentmaker

    “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose” - Jim Elliot

  • July 28, 2007 at 11:54 am

    #723141

    Yup, because you'll see the events in the system and application event logs. Also, most hardware vendors have monitoring tools. For instance, HP has SIM and IBM has Director. Both of these, I believe, can alert when a cluster resource becomes unavailable. And both are capable of emailing/paging when this sort of thing happens. If you have HP, SIM is free.

     

     

    K. Brian Kelley
    @kbriankelley

  • July 31, 2007 at 10:39 am

    #723657

    Guys,

    Does anyone also know whether or not SNMP trap is generated when failover occurs?  I ask because we have a monitoring system set up which can monitor this event.

     

    Thanks for all the advices!

  • July 31, 2007 at 1:58 pm

    #723708

    You know, it might. The monitoring agents do for products like HP's set. I know SQL Server has a MIB that can be imported, but it's not actually something I've ever looked at.

     

    K. Brian Kelley
    @kbriankelley

  • August 1, 2007 at 11:24 am

    #723965

    Brian,

    I will perform manual failover later today and test out if SNMP trap was generated.

     

    Thanks a lot!

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