The IDERA SQL DM Management Pack integrates and extends SCOM monitoring capabilities by providing database administrators and IT operators with additional insight into the availability and performance of the SQL Servers all from one console. The challenge of using SCOM is that the native SQL Server pack offers a limited and basic view of the SQL Server health. In order to get the desired amount of in-depth monitoring, it requires extensive customization from someone with great expertise in both areas of SCOM and SQL Server. SQL Diagnostic Manager Management Pack includes automatic discovery of SQL DM installations and of the SQL Server instances managed from those installations. Once discovered, cycle DM management pact propagates the current status health and events of monitor instances up to SCOM. Once installed it provides additional views of the SCOM console and pulls alert from the SQL DM manager repository. These alerts are then displayed in SCOM as well as integrated with this com database. Because the management pack is pulling from the DM repository, it means that there is no need to modify the alerts from within this com interface. If any alerts necessitate an action, the SQL DBA is able to make those changes directly from the SQL DM console, which will be automatically reflected in the SCOM console. SQL DM users alert actions and responses to control which alerts are escalated to SCOM and whether they go into SCOM as an event or an alert. Let me show you how.

Once we are in SQL Diagnostic Manager, we can go into tools, alert action, and responses, and that would take us to the alert action or responses window, where we can see different roles that we may have already enabled. And we can see there is a rule here for SCOM that basically would send all metrics that have any type of severity, that means informational, warning, critical, and they would send that to SCOM as an event. If you want to use that already, you do not have to do anything else, but if you want to use something more specific, then you can create that as well. First, let us talk about the action providers. In the action providers, we have email provider, for example, you can send an email, or you can run an action with a PowerShell script, but in this case, we are going to focus on this to send alerts to SCOM and sent events to the SCOM action provider. And those are enabled already. Now what we can do is we create a new rule. In this case, I am just gonna send to SCOM. All the blocking alerts, so I am gonna call it SCOM locking alerts, and also I am gonna do this for the group the works during the day. So I am gonna say days shift. And that is my title or my alert. The next thing I am gonna do is I am gonna specify the conditions. The conditions is basically what are the things that need to happen in order for me to fire that alert, or to, in this case, send it to SCOM.

So when I take a look here I can say well I can say where the specific metric, in this case, has to be blocking, blocking session, count click OK. Only if it is warning or critical. Then the next one that I am going to do is based on a specific time. So I can see here a specific time, and I want to do this during the shift of 7:00 a.m. in the morning until 7:00 a.m. at night, that is my shift. And that might be every day. Maybe it could be Monday through Friday. The next one that I want to do is I would select the instances, not all my instances are important, so I want to select those instances. I can do it by tags, which is a group of instances, or I can just do the instances that I want. So, in this case, I am going to do specific instances. So I choose, those two that are my production instances, and now if all of those conditions are met right 7:00 to 7:00 p.m., Monday through Friday only, so not on a Saturday, not if it is a p.m. and night, only on those two instances if blocking session is warning or critical, then what do I want to do with that? I want to send an alert.

I enable that. That information will be sent to SCOM as an alert. It is as simple as that. Now from the SCOM console, you will notice a new note appears called IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager. When we expand this note, we see additional views. Each view available provides a different level of help into the health of the monitors SQL environment. In addition to the health of the SQL Server, the DM management pack also reports the overall health of the SQL in the environment that I am currently monitoring. In this example, I have a SQL instance called SQL One. We can see the health of the instance at a high level, or we can navigate to the events section, which will show us an exhaustive list of everything that is currently happening, as well as what has happened in the past. Note that the SQL DM management pack reports rich even descriptions in the source field as well within the details pane below. Traditionally with manage packs, they only report event codes from within these views, which usually requires an operator to select each and every event individually, to review its details. However, that is not the case here. At anytime, one can modify the filter, and filter on the view for the events based on a number of different preferences. These filters can be saved and reused to personalize the look and feel of the DM management pack. The real power of SQL DM management pack is that right out of the box it provides visibility with SCOM for every single alert and notification within SQL Diagnostic Manager. This means no additional customization is required of SCOM to get you in-depth monitoring and visibility of your SQL Enterprise for your IT operations department. To learn more about SQL Diagnostic Manager and SCOM, please visit www.idera.com. Thank you.