Reasons to present on why use SQL to monitor itself vs 3rd party software

  • I am in a small battle with our OPs department which wants to use their software (nagios) to begin monitoring replication latencies. As DBAs, we currently monitor this regularly with a threshold of 10 minutes. I need some solid, concrete, business reasons why we should not ALSO set up monitoring through this 3rd party software where they would basically be calling a stored procedure from their central monitoring server on an 5-10 minute basis. Am I wrong to fight this? (they currently monitor disk space, connectivity, sql connectivity through a simple select 1 query, and replication status through a dmv query). If I am not wrong to fight this, I need strong reasons why. I have used these so far, but need more ammo!

    SQL Server is built to optimize this monitoring on its own

    By running individual queries that create a connection and increase Network I/O as well as CPU utilization and memory usage, we are adding resource contention to our production servers

    As dba's we cannot turn off our own monitoring from a risk management POV as it is not dependent on initiating a connection to run and has the lowest risk of failure in a disaster situation

    We can add individuals or groups to our notification emails, but I strongly recommend against running more outside monitoring queries against our production servers if there is not a strong business case

    Thoughts?

    Thanks in advance,

    Jared

    Jared
    CE - Microsoft

  • An extra monitoring query every 5-10 minutes shouldn't be of much concern, depending on the size of the returned dataset. If it is, you have bigger problems than monitoring. Just insist that the DBAs write the monitoring proc. If you're a DBA with multiple teams monitoring your servers, I'm trusting you already know how Outlook filters work...

    When a server's not behaving well it has problems monitoring itself, and it's good to have a different computer calling your attention to it.

    I could go on, but I think I'm simply responding to your request in the opposite. Sorry. 🙂

    Eddie Wuerch
    MCM: SQL

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