November 20, 2011 at 10:05 pm
So I'm looking at some 3rd party tools to help me manage multiple SQL Servers (all 2008R2 64bit - looking to go right to 2012 on release) and the tools from RedGate look pretty awesome. Does anyone have any experience with them? Maybe some better recommendations? The DBA Bundle they have is what I'm looking at - it lets me do lots of stuff with monitoring and backups and appears will save me tons of time (when dealing with more than 50 instances on 2 diff servers).
Any thoughts or opinions are appreciated. Thanks!
November 21, 2011 at 3:47 am
I've been working with Red Gate tools for 10 years now. I've been working for the company for the last nine months. I liked their software so much I went and begged for a job.
Their stuff is marvelous. But I'm not going into a sales pitch because I'm a tech geek, not a salesman. What kind of management tasks are you looking to automate? Let's focus on task. There's stuff they do well, but there are other tools out there that can do certain tasks better.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
November 21, 2011 at 8:00 am
Hi Chris Metzger
Without second thought go with RedGate Tools i have been working redgate tool for last 2years and i feel its have everything that you might be looking and very good thing is you have packages in it so no need to worry to buy whole tool of redgate so can go with the tool you need the most.
All the best.
Thanks & Regards
Syed Sami Ur Rehman
SQL-Server (Developer)
Hyderabad
Email-sami.sqldba@gmail.com
November 22, 2011 at 4:19 am
Thanks! Yeah I'm thinking the DBA bundle is what's going to work best. I need to be able to monitor 2 primary SQL Servers, one mirror, and one offsite DR log receiver. The bundle has the Backup Pro, HyperBac, Virtual Restore, and the Multi Script in addition to the Monitor - and all of those have features I could really use to actively manage the SQL Servers in the platform as well as their footprint (plus if scripts for our app need to be rolled out to all DBs then we can do it easily for all clients at once using the Multi Script tool - instead of waiting for a patch installer to be released).
The Monitor is the most important piece I think and it appears to do everything I'm looking for so unless someone has a better suggestion I'll stick with the recommendation I already made to my boss. Thanks!!
November 22, 2011 at 4:36 am
i would say its a matter of opinion, personally i am more swayed towards Spotlight from Quest for monitoring, we purchased this before SQL monitor was released, and tried Diagnostic Manager from Idera and Spotlight side by side and went for Spotlight and have stuck with it.
What I would say is try and get all the tools from all the different vendors and give them a go, most come with 14 to 30 day free trials.
If you buy enough Quest can usually give pretty big discounts, especially when coming to the end of their financal year (next month) when I am hoping to get a load more licences through the door as our environment has increased from 200+ servers to more like 300+
One thing I like about Quest as well is you can monitor any windows boxes (e.g IIS, file servers) for no additional cost.
But it is a matter of opinion.
November 22, 2011 at 4:36 am
Sounds good. If you hit technical issues, you know where to find me.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
November 22, 2011 at 4:51 am
The Spotlight from Quest Software looks cool too - I don't need to monitor the underlying VM host (plus I don't have access to it so whatever I choose will be running inside of a VM anyways) but being able to monitor my other Windows App Servers (both IIS and RDS) along with SQL Servers (and I could throw my infrastructure VMs in for good measure) would be really great.
I do need to keep in mind that I won't be the only one using this (folks in my absence as well as my offshore resource - and they aren't SQL experts by any stretch) so it needs to be easy to use. Does the Quest stuff offer some other tools like the Red Gate (ie for backup compression)? I'll look around at their site - thanks for the tip!
November 22, 2011 at 5:13 am
Chris Metzger (11/22/2011)
The Spotlight from Quest Software looks cool too - I don't need to monitor the underlying VM host (plus I don't have access to it so whatever I choose will be running inside of a VM anyways) but being able to monitor my other Windows App Servers (both IIS and RDS) along with SQL Servers (and I could throw my infrastructure VMs in for good measure) would be really great.I do need to keep in mind that I won't be the only one using this (folks in my absence as well as my offshore resource - and they aren't SQL experts by any stretch) so it needs to be easy to use. Does the Quest stuff offer some other tools like the Red Gate (ie for backup compression)? I'll look around at their site - thanks for the tip!
You can monitor VMware ESX if thats what you ment by the VM host or do you mean the VM guest as it would see that as Windows not VMware so if you use Hyper-V instead of ESX you can still see your underlying Windows metrics. If you did want to monitor ESX all you would need to do is ask your ESX admins to grant the spotlight service account you run spotlight as, full read only control to the ESX hosts/data m
Spotlight is quite funky, lots of spinning dials, and each dial, line, metric etc has a detail if you left click it for a bit of info on that metric. People at the old place used to say it was like being on the Star Trek Enterprise. Unlike SQLMonitor and Diagnostic Manager there is no web interface for Spotlight yet, I have an outstanding "feature enhancement" with Quest to see if this will be built into the product in a future release, if this is something your looking for I would suggest Foglight instead as this is web based and does the same as Spotlight with a few more things thrown in.
The do a product called LiteSpeed which is their version of backup compression, last prices I got where around £1500 per product, but its licensed at the server level, not instance level, so if you have SQL Enterprise and run 50 instances, its not 50 x £1500, its just £1500 each. There is then a 20% maintenance/support fee per year after the first year for Spotlight, the dev team is based in Australia so they dont commit to the 24/7 support should a problem need development interaction, but they do have support guys around the world who know the product inside out. LiteSpeed is 25% year on year after the first year, but this is for 24/7 support, dev teams around the world and they usually hope to have a fix within 4 hours, hence the extra 5% on the support price.
I got 85 Spotlight and 65 Litespeed licences, with years 2 and 3 maintenance a couple of years back now, should of cost something like £600k, but was around £75k due to the size of the order and was at the end of their financial.
November 22, 2011 at 8:45 am
Chris Metzger i agree with the all the above post.. as i was worked most with redgate tool so i suggest you with it... but its true fact i have not gone wlth other tool either so you can have a look to each of them with its trial version and test it to belive it.:-)
Thanks & Regards
Syed Sami Ur Rehman
SQL-Server (Developer)
Hyderabad
Email-sami.sqldba@gmail.com
November 22, 2011 at 1:59 pm
Yeah I'm going to have to load both and test them out.
@anthony.green - no I was speaking about the host itself not the guest. The hosts are in a true-clouded tier 3 SAS70 Type II datacenter so those folks monitor the hardware for me (so NMP - Not My Problem). That cost is worrysome though - I only have 3 SQL Servers but over 60 app servers (all VM obviously). So that's going to be a big deal to balance cost vs features (The Red Gate stuff is very inexpensive and I know I can get that cost approved - but if I'm looking at 10's of thousands of dollars I know that won't fly at all right now).
November 23, 2011 at 1:45 am
yeah the cost can be a bit daunting I do admit, but with Idera and Red-Gate (from what I know) their products only monitor SQL hosts, not any app servers, unless you buy Sharepoint Diagnostic Manager from Idera which will but thats another product to purchase.
It is one of them where you would have to weigh up the costs and benefits of each product before commiting yourself.
For Spotlight you would only purchase 3 and 3 LiteSpeed licences, so your looking around £10K (approx £3.3k per server) but if you where to add in the 60 app servers, the overall cost would still be £10K, but cost per server would be a lot less (Approx £71.43 per server for Spotlight and £1500 for each LiteSpeed licence for the SQL servers).
November 23, 2011 at 3:05 am
I went the opposite way when I did my product assestment.
I found Spotlight is pretty (impressive for management) but too full of fluff and not intuitive to use.
Idera Diagnostic manager is very similar in layout to Outlook and is easy to pick up and use. Especially with junior users and new employees
November 23, 2011 at 3:07 am
Also, I was never responsible for monitoring anything other than SQL servers so the ability to check for the existence of another server was usless to me
November 23, 2011 at 3:50 am
Yeah see monitoring SQL is the first priority but if I can throw in my IIS and termservs too? Well that's just G-R-A-V-Y and would make my life so much easier. Being the admin for the entire platform makes for an interesting set of responsibilities but if I can monitor it all and be proactive then I can reduce the cost to support the platform.
Sounds like what I need to do is spin up 2 new VMs on my Infrastructure vLAN and use one to test the RedGate and one to test the Quest and see which one I like better and which one lets me do more for my money. I prefer to use something kinda all-in-one if I can or at least all from the same company so they all work together - no need to make it any more complicated especially if I need to hand something off to my offshore resource (it has to be really easy and clear for him to do/use).
November 23, 2011 at 3:56 am
MysteryJimbo (11/23/2011)
I went the opposite way when I did my product assestment.I found Spotlight is pretty (impressive for management) but too full of fluff and not intuitive to use.
Idera Diagnostic manager is very similar in layout to Outlook and is easy to pick up and use. Especially with junior users and new employees
See I like Outlook but I hate it's UI when it comes to placement of tasks and buttons (at least 2010) - it takes a lot of getting used to when you used to be able to have buttons for everything by default (or pretty much). If it's pretty to look at then all the better - I don't necessarily need a lot of stuff just something that monitors things like bottlenecks and memory usage (or things like que'd writes/reads, locked processes, are maintenance plans running as designed and scheduled, did backups complete, and the like) so I can correct and add more resources to that system or instance. For IIS though it is very important to monitor the app pools to make sure they are recycling like they're supposed to or our app hangs up and then users start to call - so something that keeps that under the microscope would be really helpful because then we could just get emails when something is wrong or needs to be looked at before users notice.
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