By: Lora Johnson
To help extend monitoring within your Microsoft SQL Server workloads, Blue Medora recently released an updated management pack for Microsoft SQL Server, featuring new monitoring capabilities for queries and extending its out-of-the-box dashboards to ensure you can optimize performance within your Microsoft SQL Server environment and across the IT stack.
What’s New in the MS SQL Management Pack
The Microsoft SQL Server Management Pack from Blue Medora extends monitoring beyond metrics — enabling you to dig deeper into queries at the heart of your database servers.
To augment insight into your queries, the management pack also includes a new dashboard — Microsoft SQL Server Query Analysis — that enables you to see the slowest queries by server instance, and dig deeper into specific queries to understand performance metrics.
Figure 1: The new Microsoft SQL Server Query Analysis dashboard gives you deeper insight into specific queries and their associated performance.
Why Monitor MS SQL within vROps?
When your databases are running at their best, you see a positive impact across your stack. Gaining insight into key metrics, alerts and data can transform how your databases perform. The Blue Medora Microsoft SQL Server Management Pack for vRealize Operations provides this visibility, while extending functionality to improve performance.
For example, the query analysis feature enables you to sort queries based on several different metrics, like execution time and query plans, so you can pinpoint problematic queries that are affecting your database.
In addition to the extended query analysis feature, the management pack from Blue Medora boasts more than 160 new metrics to understand how your workloads are performing. The management pack offers insight into key performance metrics, including:
- Disk usage
- Disk capacity
- Query execution time
- CPU usage
- Cluster state
Updates to the management pack include the ability to get a more granular view of how the database is performing.
Figure 2: The Microsoft SQL Server Top-N SQL Database Usage helps database administrators drill down to specific metrics.
Beyond metrics, leverage Blue Medora’s Microsoft SQL Server Management Pack to access more detailed alerts and notifications. The management pack includes a new alert — the MS SQL Server Low Page Life Expectancy Alert — that triggers whenever the page-life expectancy of the Microsoft SQL Server instance drops below the ideal, giving you an indication when more memory should be provisioned for the instance.
Figure 3: Example alert within the Microsoft SQL Server Management Pack
Problems that are identified within the database are displayed as alerts within vRealize Operations, providing insight so you can quickly repair issues before the spread to the next layer of the IT stack.
From a more comprehensive view of queries to diving deeper into key metrics to identify performance issues, the Microsoft SQL Server Management Pack gives administrators true visibility into their database servers to reduce mean-time-to-innocence, eliminate alert storms and improve troubleshooting.
For more information about the Management Pack for Microsoft SQL or to download a free trial, please visit the True Visibility Suite for VMware vRealize Operations page on Blue Medora’s website.
