MS SQL Server 2005 Data Collector. Status: 12/5/2008

(1)

Data Collector

Status: 12/5/2008

(2)

Introduction

There's more to efficient application management than maximizing availability. Targeted tuning can increase the performance and stability of business-critical applications without having to invest in additional hardware

(processors, RAM, disk space).

A number of data collectors have been developed for theGuard! ApplicationManager that provide

comprehensive monitoring and generate detailed data analyses. Data collectors do more than simply collect events according to pre-defined rules. They deliver every performance value and the current status of each application object in real time. They also provide insight into configuration attributes, such as the release status or the application's parameter settings. Data collectors model an application in objects and sub-objects, enabling a dedicated handling of alerts, monitoring or status messages. This model ensures that information is clearly structured and that messages are easy to allocate to a problem.

Pre-defined and reusable policies for each type of application facilitate the implementation of the solution and the adaptation of monitoring to dynamic landscapes. The ease with which thresholds are set ensures the early recognition of potential errors. Comprehensive reaction management enables flexible alerting for more than 100 different devices and alarm consoles.

The automatic discovery of new application instances and objects, including the automatic allocation of policies, enables automatic monitoring even in those cases in which system administrators have completely reconfigured the application, for example, by adding new instances or objects.

Central reporting at the application instance and application object level provides for a detailed and effective capacity management of all resources.

Integrated Service Level Management ensures that the service levels for application availability and

performance are achieved, while Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) can be easily defined at the application object level.

The performance features of the ApplicationManager Data

Collector for MS SQL Server:

The data collector for Microsoft SQL Server enables the comprehensive management of Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

With ApplicationManager, a number of MS SQL servers including the databases can be monitored and compared at the same time.

All of the components of a Microsoft SQL Server, such as services and databases, are defined and analyzed individually within the framework of the CIM model as managed objects (MO). This enables information to be clearly structured and the components to be individually controlled. The MS SQL data collector is a very powerful application that consists of a number of objects, event calendars and performance counters. All of the information is described in the data collector's online documentation. This document provides an overview of the most important functions.

(4)

Overview of Microsoft SQL Server:

Microsoft SQL Server, a relational database system based on the SQL standard, is generally used to provide with high speed the high data load of business-critical applications such as SAP R/3©, to manage the data and to store it permanently. A business-critical application can only be operated smoothly, if the underlying Microsoft SQL Server is high available and does not create bottlenecks.

The additional Analysis Server is the central main component to operate as BW-System (OLAP) and will be promoted with SQL Server 2005. As the SQL Server is more and more in use as central database, services like SQL Server Agent for background processing and data exchange gain more and more significance.

The architecture of the Microsoft SQL Server allows one or more different databases to be managed by a single server process (Win32 service). It is possible to run several databases with just one SQL Server, for example for different applications or business divisions.

Every database consists of data files and transaction log files which are combined in so-called filegroups. A database consists at least of one filegroup for data files and one for the transaction log file. These groups consist of at least one data file respectively one transaction log file. It is possible to add more data files to a filegroup in order to increase the volume of a database according to the requirements. Further filegroups for data files can also be added.

In addition to the user or customer databases that contain the actual application data, Microsoft SQL Server needs four so-called system databases, "master", "model", "msdb" and "tempdb", which are created during the installation of the SQL Server. The SQL Server needs these system databases to manage internal system information and parameters.

It is possible to operate several, completely independent Microsoft SQL Server 2005 instances on large and fast server systems.

(5)

Architecture of a Microsoft SQL Server system:

MS SQL Server Instanz 3

System Databases

master model msdb tempdb

Database 1 User Databases Database 2 Database 3 Database n

MS SQL Server Instanz 2

MS SQL Server Instanz 1

DB-Client DB-Client DB-Client

Microsoft SQL Server System

Database

Transaction Log Log-File Log-File Log-File Log-File Data Filegroup Data-File Data-File Data-File Data-File Database Connections

(6)

The MS SQL Server Data Collector

The data collector allows monitoring all installed Microsoft SQL Server instances including its corresponding databases.

The following figure shows the status of all objects of a single Microsoft SQL Server in theGuard! ApplicationManager's Managed Monitor. Appendix A contains a list of the objects.

All important components of an SQL Server system, such as SQL Server instances, databases, SQL Server agent instances, analysis server, etc. are defined and displayed as Managed Objects in the Managed Monitor. The Managed Objects are hierarchically arranged and clearly structured thus providing the current status of every SQL Server component at a glance. It is possible to customize monitoring parameters individually for every component.

(7)

SQL Server Monitoring:

Different criteria can be used to monitor and analyze every instance of a MS SQL Server:

 Status of SQL Server instance (Win32 Service)

 Monitoring of SQL server log files

 Windows event log events generated by SQL Server

All of the monitored functions can be customized individually and separately for each SQL Server instance.

In addition to the monitoring a lot of useful information regarding an SQL Server instance can be displayed in the Managed Monitor.

 Detailed version information

 SQL Server logins

 Internal SQL Server processes

 Active client connections with the SQL Server

(8)

Database Monitoring

Databases are important objects regarding the monitoring of the availability, because the availability of

applications depends directly on the availability of their databases. All databases of the MS SQL Server can be monitored individually for a large number of different criteria:

 Database status

 Database availability for clients

 Required disk space for data files and transaction log files

 Automatic file growth of data files and transaction log files

 Check, if database options have been changed

In order to check the status, a client connection to the corresponding database is automatically established, thus monitoring the availability of the databasesat the same time.

All of the monitored monitoring sampling rates can be customized individually and separately for each database.

The database properties such as database options, total required disc space for data files and transaction log files, file groups, files and configuration, database users, locks, etc. can be directly displayed in the properties.

(9)

Performance and Capacity Management:

Managed Objects such as SQL Server instances or databases display a great number of statistical values regarding their real-time status: utilization and performance values such as number of current client

connections, required disk space, database size, transaction log file size, transactions/sec, buffer cache hit ratio, etc.. Now in the new version of SQLServer 2005 also data files can be permanent ly monitored and analyzed regarding the free and used space in per cent and in megabytes. One can set thresholds for each statistical value, which will generate alerts if violated. This feature also is used forfunctional and performance monitoring. The statistical values can also be collected in the ApplicationManager database and evaluated using REALTECH Reporting. These reports can be used for trend analysis regarding for example the consumption of disk space as a basis forcost and capacity planning.

It is also possible to display and compare all statistical values in the Realtime-Performance-Monitor, which is very useful for theperformance and memory optimization.

(10)

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 offers, in opposite to SQLServer 2000, definitely more monitoring possibilities, which also appears in the new data collector.

Thus, for theAnalysisServer,a large number of new performance counters is available for the utilization of the main memory. For performance and tuning there is now an additional possibility to monitorCursor Manager regarding various performance values. The same applies toSqlServerAgentthat delivers code numbers for jobs and job-steps (see appendix A of this Whitepaper).

(11)

Management of the Windows Operating System

In order to provide complete security for a Microsoft SQL Server one should monitor essential parameters of the Windows operating system, such as physical hard disks, processor utilization, page file, etc. These and other values can be gathered and evaluated with the Windows 2003 - Windows 2000 data collector (see the White Paper for Windows data collector").

Pre-defined Monitoring Policies

The MS SQL Server data collector contains a number of comprehensivepre-defined policiesfor each object type, such as server or database.

Platform Support and Availability:

The Microsoft SQL server data collector supports the operating systems Windows 2000 and Windows 2003. The data collector is generally available.

For more information about REALTECH’s software solutions see: www.realtech.com REALTECH AG Industriestr. 39c 69190 WalldorfGermany Tel: +49-(0)6227-837-591 Fax: +49-(0)6227-837-837 mailto:[email protected] http://www.realtech.com

(12)

Appendix A: The Data Collector's Object Structure

The data collector is structured in object types, which among other things, is essential for the configuration and allocation of events as well as for all of the other functions:

Object Metrics Theme

Server One to n MS SQL Server instances per Managed Node

SQL Server monitoring – activity and memory usage on server level SQL Server Agent One SQL Server Agent per

MS SQL Server instance

SQL Server job monitoring (i.e. backup jobs)

Database 4 system databases and n user databases per MS SQL Server instance

Database monitoring – activity and data volume on database level

Locks 7 different lock objects per MS SQL Server instance

Locks for different resource types, such as databases, tables, keys, etc.

Plan Cache 6different Plan Cache Objects per MS SQL Server instance

Memory utilization to store objects, like stored procedures

Buffer One to n Buffer Partition Objects per MS SQL Server Instance

Utilization of free pages

Broker Activation 3 + n (per user-database) Broker Activation-Objects per MS SQL Server instance

Information about tasks that are started by the Service Broker

SQL Errors 5 different SQL Error Objects per MS SQL Server instance

Information about SQL server errors

Exec Statistics 4 different Exec Statistics Objects per MS SQL Server instance

Information about different actions

Database Mirroring 1 object per Mirror Server, whch is connected with the SQL Server

Report information about database mirroring

Wait Statistics 4 different Wait Statistics Objects per MS SQL Server instance

Information about delays

Cursor Manager 5 different Cursor Manager-Objects per MS SQL Server instance

Cursor information

Jobs 4 different Job Ojects per MS SQL Server instance

Job monitoring

JobSteps 12 different JobSteps-Objects per MS SQL Server instance