March 6, 2012 at 2:57 am
I am considering to purchase a monitoring tool for our SQL environment. At the moment, I've narrowed my choices down to 3 tools namely, (1)SCOM 2007 R2 with SQL Server Management Pack, (2) Idera SQL diagnostic manager, (3) Oracle Grid Control with SQL Server plugin.
Which tool would you recommend? Your suggestions are highly appreciated.
March 6, 2012 at 3:03 am
kopajb-884292 (3/6/2012)
I am considering to purchase a monitoring tool for our SQL environment. At the moment, I've narrowed my choices down to 3 tools namely, (1)SCOM 2007 R2 with SQL Server Management Pack, (2) Idera SQL diagnostic manager, (3) Oracle Grid Control with SQL Server plugin.Which tool would you recommend? Your suggestions are highly appreciated.
I've used a mixture of Idera's SQL DM, Quest's Spotlight and Foglight and always end up going back to Foglight.
The SMT here tried to force us to go down the SCOM route, but looking at that it monitored with the SQL plugin, it was missing quite a lot of important metrics which would render the product useless in our environment.
What other tools have you considered and what are your requirements as we found it hard to find a tool which ticked all the boxes for what we wanted.
If not already take a look at Quest and Red-Gate's SQL Monitor, you can get them on a 30day free trial to evaluate.
March 6, 2012 at 3:08 am
The are a number of focus areas , however the following are key: (1) Problem detection and resolution via email and sms alerts and automated action tasks (2) Capacity planning via trend analysis of resource(disk,ram,cpu,network,etc.) usage over past periods (e.g. month, year, etc.)
(3)Ease of use and ease of configuration (4) least performance overhead (5)Configuration change tracking including security changes (e.g. user creation, etc)
(6) Customizable in terms of what to monitor as well as customizable reports. (8) comprehensive monitoring (i.e. detailed level not just high level)
March 6, 2012 at 3:18 am
You might be lucky to get all that in one tool.
From what I remember, user account creation etc is not captured in DM, Spotlight, Foglight or SQLMonitor.
I appologies to Idera or Red-Gate but I haven't used their tools in some time which may have adapted these features in a recent version for the following
Spotlight and Foglight have the ability to create custom metrics which are not part of the standard deployment metrics, so you could build in the user account creation.
It allows you to execute a program when an alert is raised as well as send email, so you could configure SQLCMD to pass in a script to re-run a job if it fails etc
The Spotlight community provide a reporting solution which can be deployed and then you can create your own reports off the backend databases.
But if you cant find a tool which does 100% what you want, you could write your own which is what I am in the process of now, using T-SQL and SSRS as a front end.
March 6, 2012 at 8:48 am
One tool I don't see on your list is SQLSentry PerformanceAdvisor which is a very good tool for performance monitoring. It does have email alerting, but I don't think it handles account creation either. You might be able to do that with the Qucik Trace feature, but it isn't something I think is native to the tool.
Most performance monitoring products aren't going to include auditing and vice-versa.
Jack Corbett
Consultant - Straight Path Solutions
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March 8, 2012 at 4:18 am
Anthony,
I have been looking into creating some kind of DBA dashboard using SSRS so I was curious as to what sort of things you were looking to monitor in the project you are currently working on using TSQL?
March 8, 2012 at 4:39 am
Thank you guys for your responses. I've ended up evaluating 5 products (SCOM, Idera, Spotlight, SQL Sentry, Oracle Grid with SQL plugin). So far, Spotlight stands-out...the challenge is the cost (?). I haven't done cost analysis yet though, i.e. I don't know the exact cost of each product. I will do that as soon as I've explored them. I just want something that will make my life easier in administering all my SQL Servers especially since more servers will be added on the list in future...do you feel me?
Anthony, I've been looking to do that kind of thing (i.e. build my own dashboards using SSRS and SQL) for some time now without any luck.
Have you by any chance managed to make progress on your dashboard? I will really appreciate it if you can share the scripts and reports. If you can do this, you will be my hero...I swear! 😉
March 8, 2012 at 7:12 am
The metrics I have so far are
free drive space, db size and free space, job failures, memory usage,a few metrics from sys.dm_os_perf_counters, DDL changes, sys.configuration changes, permission changes, CPU usage, blocking, deadlocks, long running sql, error log checking,
indexes (missing/fragmented/reverse/redundant), tables with no PK's, tables with no clustered indexes and a few other company specific.
Most of the scripts I've found on the internet, but then there are the ones which are simple like free disk space using xp_fixeddrives and error log checking using sp_readerrorlog.
@kopajb
Last prices I had for spotlight was £1487 with a rolling 20% year on year maintenance charge, which give you support and latest versions (1st year comes with this as standard, so only payable from year 2). They will do a discount on this year on year if you purcahse in advance. We did a massive purchase of around 80 Spotlight licences and 60 LiteSpeed licences with years 2 and 3 maintenance which should of cost in the price range of around £400k, but managed to get it down to £65k due to the quantities and the time of year we purchased the products. Think if you do it year on year its 20%, then if you purchase the licence and year 2 you get it at 18% and if you purchase licence and years 2 and 3 you get it at 16% but that might of changed in the past year.
Idera was around the £1700 and again I think it was 20% year on year, and they offered discounts on the maintenance as well but it worked out differently where you paid 20% of the cost for the first year, then 19% for the second year then 18% on the 3rd year, so it does work out slightly more expensive than Spotlight.
If you've downloaded from them and given them a valid email, they are usually pretty good at getting in touch quickly so you can discuss prices with them.
If price is an factor, take a look ad Red-Gate's SQL monitor, its around £400 per server so could save a lot of money depending on what functionality you need.
March 8, 2012 at 7:55 am
Ok thanks for the info. We use RedGate Monitor but I find it very limiting and sometimes you can't trust the metrics.
V3 looks a lot better but I'm keen to create a custom dashboard. Lots of the items you suggested sound handy so I'll have to include them.
March 8, 2012 at 8:25 am
if you send me a private message i will send on the completed scripts (minus a few things) and a sample of a few reports as a starting block
i will have to remove some of the stuff due to our intellectual property as some metrics are specific for the company and use company code, but will give you the building blocks to develop further from it.
March 8, 2012 at 8:36 am
Not to be downer on rolling your own solution, you also need to take into account the time to develop, refine, and support the solution you create, which often times isn't as refined as the purchased product. Plus you have to consider what happens when you move on. With a purchased product the support continues, but when you move on, the company may have to buy something.
I love to roll my own solutions just for what I learn, in addition to the benefit of getting exactly what I want, but sometimes it's better for the company to buy a solution and learn how to use it and customize it as needed.
Jack Corbett
Consultant - Straight Path Solutions
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