System Center Advisor and SQL Server

System Center Advisor and SQL Server Codename “Atlanta”:

System Center Advisor and SQL Server Codename “Atlanta” http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff962512.aspx Ing . Eduardo Castro, PhD ecastro@grupoasesor.net http://ecastrom.blogspot.com http://comunidadwindows.org http://tiny.cc/comwindows

Session Objectives and Takeaways:

Session Objectives and Takeaways Session Objective(s): Provide a quick overview of System Center Advisor Drill into Advisor architecture Show demos of the Advisor RC Outline pricing and licensing Key Takeaways: System Center Advisor is the connection between your servers and Microsoft Customer Support You can try it for free at www.SystemCenterAdvisor.com

Customer Challenges:

Customer Challenges Time lag between discovering issue and resolving Difficult to find solutions and patches that can help resolve issue Service outages expensive and painful Today’s management products are often focused on detecting outages rather than preventing them Incorrect configuration of servers often causes performance and availability issues The right knowledge is hard to find and often out of date Properly configuring and maintaining servers to improve performance and reduce downtime Quickly resolving server issues Reducing server downtime Improving server performance

System Center Advisor Customer Benefits:

System Center Advisor Customer Benefits Increase awareness and proactively avoid problems with server deployments through ongoing assessment and alerting of configuration from a cloud service Resolve issues faster by providing Microsoft or internal support staff current and historical views into configuration to get up to date solutions for issues Help reduce downtime and improve performance of servers through proactive scanning for known configuration issues and comparison with best practices. System Center Advisor is a cloud service that proactively scans a customer’s server environment to help them gain insight into server configuration problems, resolve issues faster with support staff, and reduce server downtime, all with the security features to meet customer needs. Help resolve issues faster Help reduce downtime Proactively avoid problems

System Center Advisor Features:

System Center Advisor Features Help reduce downtime Proactively avoid problems Help resolve issues faster Alerts for unpatched, misconfigured, unsupported configurations Ongoing assessment of server configuration, with weekly summary email Assess and understand configurations from virtually anywhere SQL Server knowledge & Windows Server knowledge Comparison with best practices Access centralized data of a deployment’s configurations Access current and historical configuration data Share server configuration data with internal or Microsoft support staff Instant access to guidance and forums related to identified issues

System Center Advisor:

System Center Advisor The following workloads are analyzed: Wind ows Server 2008 and later: Active Directory Hyper-V Host General operating system SQL Server 2008 and later SQL Engine

System Center Advisor :

System Center Advisor Runs on your SQL Server system Uploading information to cloud service Configuration Performance, etc Browse using a dashboard Give access to Microsoft Support

System Center Advisor:

System Center Advisor Cloud-based SQL Server monitoring tool Can monitor SQL Server 2008 and up This secure cloud service will help DBAs to Proactively avoid problems ongoing monitoring and alerting of configuration from the cloud Reduce downtime and improve performance proactive scanning for known configuration issues and comparison with best practices Resolve issues faster ability to get a current view of your configuration, changes that have been made, and use the most up to date solutions to solve them

Proactive Knowledge:

Proactive Knowledge Advisor alerts customers when SQL and Windows Server roles are: Unpatched Beyond Microsoft Update Best practices based on support cases What we wish customers would deploy Misconfigured Can be simple or complex Not aligned to best practices gathered from customer support cases At risk of data loss Event log errors that according to customer support cases often cause downtime Point you to articles with solutions “as if you were calling Microsoft support” Unsupported Highlight unsupported configurations A real-time monitoring product (like System Center Operations Manager) will continue to be the recommended alerting solution when server roles are: Unavailable Underperforming Causing LOB downtime / business impact

Recent and Historical Context:

Recent and Historical Context Advisor provides context with historical data: Configuration Snapshot latest information about my server, instance, or database Configuration History Basic OS properties (server name, OS version, IP address, et al) Basic SQL properties ( sys.configurations , sys.databases , SERVERPROPERTY_EX, et al ) This is not an all-inclusive configuration manifest. We started with the main points that Customer Support Services (CSS) needs to diagnose problems. The type of data collected will continually expand based on CSS and customer feedback (e.g. usefulness, collection overhead, data size, data sensitivity).

Advisor Architecture:

Advisor Architecture Periodic download to customer Updated rules New configuration points Daily upload from customer Alerts Configuration End User Web Portal Review alerts and solutions Review configuration Collected Data Knowledge & Content Analysis & Aggregation Web Site Advisor Cloud Service Uploaded data is analyzed Alerts and recommendations added to customer portal Microsoft Customer Support Services and Product Teams Customer Datacenter Agents are installed on each server and run continuously Internet connected servers upload data daily Agents in private networks can route through an internet connected gateway Collected data is written to a file for customer visibility Private Network Agent Gateway Agent & Gateway Legend

System Center Advisor:

System Center Advisor Alerts Servers Accounts Configuration: Current Snapshot Configuration: Change History

System Center Advisor:

System Center Advisor Alerts View alerts to see any issues that have been detected. Servers View and manage the gateways and agents deployed in your environment Configuration: Current Snapshot View current configuration information for the computers being analyzed. Configuration: Change History View historical configuration information for the computers being analyzed.

Advisor and Your Management Solution:

Advisor and Your Management Solution Advisor analyses uploaded configuration data from your servers Provides view into current configuration Tracks and publishes historical view of changes Alerts administrator through portal and weekly summary email Not a real-time monitoring solution Advisor leverages Operations Manager 2007 R2 Agent and Management Pack technology Advisor agent does not require but works side by side with OpsMgr Reusing Operations Manager technology will enable… Future better-together scenarios with Microsoft’s management platform investments (e.g. Operations Manager, Configuration Manager, Service Manager) Minimize duplication of data collection

Alerts:

Alerts

Ignoring Alert:

Ignoring Alert

SQL Server Alerts:

SQL Server Alerts

Alert Cleaning:

Alert Cleaning dbcc checkdb (master) go dbcc checkdb (model) go dbcc checkdb ( msdb ) go

SQL Server Alerts:

SQL Server Alerts

Alert Cleaning:

Alert Cleaning Backup User Databases System databases including model should be backed up

SQL Server Alerts:

SQL Server Alerts

SQL Server Alerts:

SQL Server Alerts

Alert Cleaning:

Alert Cleaning Running CHECKDB against this database Creating a full backup of this database on a different drive Then creating a transaction log backup to avoid infinite log growth

SQL Server Alerts:

SQL Server Alerts

Alert Cleaning:

Alert Cleaning It says a SQL Server update is not needed but says a trace flag update is needed You can enable trace flag 4135 or trace flag 4199 to activate this fix

SQL Alerts:

SQL Alerts

Alert Cleaning:

Alert Cleaning One of the most common issues regarding the performance of applications using tempdb is allocation page contention Symptoms are high waits on PAGELATCH for PFS, GAM, and SGAM pages.

Alert Cleaning:

Alert Cleaning One of the most common reasons for this contention is the lack of multiple database files for tempdb . Spreading out the number of files for tempdb helps relieve bottlenecks for allocation pages in these files.

Server Impact and Data Collected:

Server Impact and Data Collected Low overhead Agent CPU: < 1% average, occasional spikes Agent Memory: < 75 MB Gateway Upload: ~100KB/server/day Server management data only Diagnostic data (configuration settings, error logs) Utilization (CPU, IO, Available Memory, etc.) Workload throughput (transactions/day, GB served/day) No customer data or custom workload data

Data Privacy & Handling Sensitive Data:

Data Privacy & Handling Sensitive Data Complete Privacy Statement available Advisor only has visibility into servers with Agents deployed on them Uploads are archived on-premises (5 days by default) for audit trail and to enable you to inspect the data Upload time is configurable; you can stop uploading at any time You can close your account and request to remove data from Advisor servers Your organization controls what non-Microsoft party will have access to your individual organization’s data Microsoft will not use this data for sales/licensing validation

Roadmap and Licensing:

Roadmap and Licensing Beta Release in Nov 2010 SQL Server content RC release in March 2011 http://www.SystemCenterAdvisor.com Available to all customers in US* Additional SQL content & Windows Server content RTW release is TBD Target: H2 CY11 Available as a benefit of Software Assurance for supported server workloads * Additional market support to be announced later in CY11

https://beta.microsoftatlanta.com https://www.systemcenteradvisor.com/ :

Demo https:// beta.microsoftatlanta.com https://www.systemcenteradvisor.com /

Next Steps:

Next Steps Just want to test Advisor? Sign up on www.SystemCenterAdvisor.com Want to guide the future of Advisor? We’re looking for external customers for our TAP program. Please send nominations to: AtlTAPnm@microsoft.com Requirements U.S.-based organization with Windows Servers physically located in U.S. Willing to deploy the Advisor agent on production systems Will commit time from DBA and/or IT Admin to provide detailed feedback on rules and functionality

Resources:

Resources SIM349 : Microsoft System Center Advisor Technical Overview http:// blogs.msdn.com/b/psssql/archive/2011/04/01/system-center-advisor-anything-interesting-before-i-catch-a-plane.aspx

Preguntas y Respuestas:

Preguntas y Respuestas

System Center Advisor and SQL Server Codename “Atlanta”:

System Center Advisor and SQL Server Codename “Atlanta” http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff962512.aspx Ing . Eduardo Castro, PhD ecastro@grupoasesor.net http://ecastrom.blogspot.com http://comunidadwindows.org http://tiny.cc/comwindows

Slide 39:

© 2010 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista and other product names are or may be registered trademarks and/or trademarks in the U.S. and/or other countries. The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation as of the date of this presentation. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information provided after the date of this presentation. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.