Tool For Monitoring Multiple Instances for Health and Shop Standards

  • My shop manages over 200 SQL instances (2000+ databases) across several domains. We need to keep an eye on how they're doing. Got enough disk? Backups being taken? Using compression if it can?.... that sort of thing.

    We have set up a very cludgy home-grown tool that uses a registered server group with all the instances in it. Daily, we manually kick off a bunch of scripts to look into this stuff and write it all out to a .csv file. Then we run a job to import all of the results into a history table.

    Good stuff?

    Not really.

    You can't automate it. It has to be manually done.

    The process for importing the results to a table is extremely kludgy.

    Modifying the process would be very difficult. I set it up and I'm retiring very soon (yipee!).

    We want a tool we can purchase that can do this type of thing, has a gui interface and will be easy to use and maintain. Most tools seem to be performance monitoring tools that have pretty dashboards or can alert when a threshold is hit. That's not what we need.

    I'm evaluating Idera Diagnostic Manager. That's good at what it does, but it doesn't seem to be able to do what we need.

    I'm starting to look at SCOM. So far, I am doubtfull that it will do.

    Does anybody know of anything to go out to 200+ servers, run scripts, return multiple rows of multiple columns of data and insert them into a central repository for historical reference?

    Here are some to the types of scripts we currently run daily:

    C: Drives With < 1 GB Free

    Drives (other than C ) With < 10,000MB Free

    DB logs > 10,000 MB

    Tempdb > 25GB

    Is Max Memory Set? What is the setting and what is total RAM on the box?

    Is SQLAgent Running?

    What Full-Recovery-Model DBs Have Never Had Their Logs Backed Up

    F.R.M. DB Logs Not Backed Up In Last Week

    Databases NEVER Backed up

    Databases not backed up in the last week

    Databases Not backed up last 2 days

    databases owned by valid login which is not sa

    Database Owners Without Login

    Databases Not in MULTI_USER Mode

    For databases SQL2008R2 or greater: Is Backup Compression enabled?

    Type of Database Backups taken (local, Netbackup, or Avamar)

    Maint Plans Failed in Last Week

    Maint Plans Failed Last Night

    Names of All User Databases in the instance

  • Enterprise Policy Management Framework[/url] seems to be what you're after.

    Works quite well if your instances are all the same version. It has some issues with old SQL 2000.

    Other than that, it does exactly what you are asking and it is free.

    -- Gianluca Sartori

  • I took a look at the site in codeplex for this tool. It looks promising, but I am concerned about a few things.

    1. Since it is free, there likely not anybody paid to support it. If we are going to depend on it for management of our enterprise stuff, we'd like to be sure we can yell at somebody when it doesn't work, and feel that needed features will be added, and have somebody to call when we have questions.

    2. The tab on the web page marked "documentation" comes back and says there isn't any. That might make using it a bit difficult.

    3. There was a question in the discussions section from somebody who was trying to combine results from different domains. Does this tool not work across domains (can't depend on a trust in our shop)?

    Does anybody know of a product for purchase that does this kind of thing?

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