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Data Collector vs Utility Control Point

  • June 22, 2011 at 2:44 am

    #252400

    Hi All

    Is there any differences between data collector and utility control point other than, the centralised MDW and the better dashboards in UCP?

    Thanks

    Ant

  • June 30, 2011 at 9:32 am

    #1346626

    Hey, Ant.

    I am still working through the details of The Utility and Utility Control Point / Managed Instance architecture, but have a few things to point out.

    The Data Collector is a "runtime component" that regularly executes processes to gather data. These run on the "Managed Instance" which is "enrolled" on the Utility Control Point. New mumbo-jumbo for there is a specialized SQL Server feature that collects data [the runtime component], then SQL Agent Jobs for transmitting that data to a database on the UCP, where it is accumulated. There are a bunch of Collector SQL Agent jobs on the Managed Instance that then move the data to the Utility Control Point - you can see these under the SQL Agent - they start with "collection_set%."

    If you are building out a SQL Server 2008 R2-only monitoring service, The Utility is an option and stores all the information on the Utility Control Point. This is a replacement for the earlier "Mangement Data Warehouse."

    There are some good docs out there, but there is no one doc I have found that explains the whole picture well. Try this one to clarify some of the internal processing.

    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb677355.aspx

  • June 30, 2011 at 9:38 am

    #1346630

    So basically its the same as data collector only central as from what I can see UCP enables the data collector on the managed but makes it report to the UCP instead of a local database.

  • June 30, 2011 at 10:30 am

    #1346650

    It is somewhat more complex [C'mon this is Msft we are talking about - when was the last time they made something simple?]. The UCP is the data warehouse. The Data Collectors are essentially SQL Features that run on other computers to gather data. The SQL Agent collector% jobs on the Managed Instance move that data from the Managed Instance to the UCP.

  • June 30, 2011 at 10:34 am

    #1346654

    I should clarify one other thing. You could have the UCP on every machine separately. In this case, the UCP, Managed Instance, Data Collectors would all reside on the same box. But if you used this approach, you will not have a central point where you can review a group of servers. Having a group of servers together on one UCP is helpful because you don't have to check servers. One production UCP may have a number of related servers writing data to it where you could pretty readily assess at least CPU utilization and much more if you dig into the sysutility_mdw database.

    Caution: If you have a big transactional environment, you may want to be careful about how much load you can put on the UCP.

  • October 7, 2011 at 2:46 am

    #1391608

    I know this is quite an old message, but does UCP actually collect the same information as Data Collector, but UCP now supersedes it? As it looks like you can't have both running on the same instance?

    Also, can you have Email alerts sent to you from UCP - I can't see where through the GUI?

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