Monitoring SQL Servers

  • We currently have Patrol and we are looking at MOM. I was wondering if anyone has used both and which one they like better and why? We have over 55 SQL Servers and 300 + databases so setting up monitoring is very important for this one man shop.

    Any information would be great. Thanks


    Stacey W. A. Gregerson

  • What monitoring tools you use will likely depend on what you want to get out of them...

    Things for you to consider:

    - what will you be monitoring?

    (CPU/memory use, drive IO/freespace/fragmentation, db size, backup job completion, other? (you'll also likely want to ask yourself how many things to be monitored have perfmon counters associated with them, how many have other built-in windows hooks, and what custom items will there be?))

    - what intelligence do you want to glean from the data?

    (e.g. is alerting when a threshold's exceeded sufficient, or do you want more granular notification? (only on the nth time, or if it persists for x minutes...is the 1st occurrence a warning, and the 5th critical? do you need to know when something hasn't occurred? etc. etc.))

    - what do you want to accomplish when alerts fire?

    (e-mail a distribution list, execute a script to try to fix things, page an on-call admin)

    - how easy is it to manage?

    (with a decent number of systems to watch, central management features are crucial...the smallest task x 55 can eat up far too much time...reporting functionality for clients and/or management may be a nice-to-have as well)

    I've seen patrol used to successfully monitor 1000's of servers of various flavours, with initial growing pains mostly being fine tuning thresholds and alerting practices. At that time it was not yet robust enough to fire an alert when a threshold had been exceeded x times or for y minutes, however I'm told that this has been added in more recent versions. Patrol was firmly in place, however I believe MOM was being evaluated, possibly for features that have since been added -- I'll see what info I can obtain, and what the end result was. If I uncover anything new, I'll post it here.

Viewing 2 posts - 1 through 1 (of 1 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply