DEVOPSdigest

Recognizing the increasing take-up of cloud storage, the latest version of Redgate’s SQL Monitor enables entire SQL Server estates to be managed and monitored from one dashboard, whether they are on-premises or in the Azure cloud.

After months in development, SQL Monitor v9 gives users the ability to seamlessly monitor hybrid and cloud estates, including both Azure Managed Instances and SQL Database Elastic Pools.

This is an important move because cloud adoption rates are increasing, as highlighted in Redgate’s recently released 2019 State of Database DevOps Report. Drawing insights from over 1,000 participants and now in its third year, it revealed that 50% of organizations are now taking advantage of the cloud, with 19% hosting their servers mostly or wholly in the cloud, and 31% using a combination of cloud and on-premises servers.

However, as the size, complexity and mix of SQL Server estates increases, so does the need for a third party monitoring tool. Indeed, the report also showed that while 23% of organizations with ten servers or fewer use a third-party tool, this rises to 51% in organizations with over 500 servers.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise because manual monitoring using hand-rolled scripts can provide basic information like wait stats and memory utilization, but falls over when it comes to spotting trends and issues, or helping with capacity planning, performance problems, or troublesome queries.

To resolve this, SQL Monitor now offers full support and management for SQL databases hosted on Azure, and includes 14 Azure-specific alerts and 36 Azure-specific metrics. From one dashboard, users can monitor their entire SQL Server estate, whether on-premises or in Azure, and know instantly when any problem on any server arises.

As Anthony Nocentino, Microsoft Data Platform MVP and Enterprise Architect, comments: “I typically see companies using on-premises SQL Server for legacy databases or where a strategic decision hasn’t been made yet about migrating to the cloud, which better equips them to deal with fluctuating demand in storage and compute capacity. Wherever they are, though, they still want to monitor the performance and discover any issues before they have an impact. SQL Monitor’s ability to manage large and mixed SQL Server estates from the same dashboard at the same time is a great way of easing the monitoring burden, which is becoming more complex.”

That complexity is eased further with the ability to view disk usage across an entire estate and use predictive trends to accurately estimate future requirements, and manage backups from a central location and quickly see where attention is needed.

The update also helps with auditing and compliance by showing users what versions of SQL Server exist across their estate, whether they’re supported, and any patches or new versions which are available. It then lets users download updates from within SQL Monitor so that they can be sure their servers are up to date and patched safely.

And to simplify licensing issues, the SQL Monitor licensing model now matches the Azure licensing model, making the ongoing management of SQL Server estates easy and straightforward.