Microsoft has updated the System Center Management Pack for Azure SQL Database to version 6.7.11.0. As this update is released as a public preview, you can try it out by downloading the Community Technical Preview 1 of the Management Pack.
Do note that you will require Windows Server 2012 with at least System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1 to test and explore this new update to the Management Pack.
Support for Elastics Pools and Azure AD Authentication are two notable features of this update. The other changes include:
- Azure Resource Manager is now supported: the previous versions of the Management Pack used T-SQL queries to SQL Server system views to get information on the databases health and performance; now, the Management Pack can also get this information from Azure REST API.
- Improved monitoring efficiency: Now, monitoring pool defines monitoring target ; WatcherNode class is considered to be deprecated.
- Added support for Multiple subscriptions and multiple servers.
- Added regular expression filtering capability for Azure SQL Database instances and Elastic Pools.
- Improved SCOM Add Monitoring Wizard to reflect the new features of the Management Pack.
- Added health monitoring for Database Geo-Replication and Elastic Pools.
- Added monitoring for “Average DTU utilization percentage” metric.
- Fixed issue: some rules work only if more than 1% of Microsoft Azure SQL Database space is used.
- Introduced performance improvements to the Management Pack.
- Optimized performance rules notation: standardized all Object Names; stopped the use of Instant names.
- Updated the visualization library and the guide to reflect all the changes.
As you can see above, this big update brings some noteworthy improvements. Microsoft says that they are “working on handling monitoring of larger number of databases”, and better scaleability for the final release. The following numbers give some perspective of the current performance and limitations.
- 2 management servers in resource pool, each server is 3CPU & 7GB RAM (almost identical to Azure Cloud VM — DS2_V2Standard), one server is launching workflows, the other is for High Availability
Azure SQL DB configuration it can healthily monitor: 1 Azure SQL server having 1000 deployed databases
- 4 management servers in resource pool, each server is 3CPU & 7GB RAM (almost identical to Azure Cloud VM — DS2_V2Standard), two servers are launching workflows, the others are for High Availability
Azure SQL DB configuration it can healthily monitor: 2 Azure SQL servers, 1000 databases per each (2000 databases in total)
- 1 management server, 4 CPU & 14GB RAM (Azure Cloud VM — DS3_V2Standard)
Azure SQL DB configuration it can healthily monitor: 2 Azure SQL servers, 1000 databases per each (2000 databases in total)
- 4 management servers in resource pool, each server is 4 CPU & 14GB RAM (Azure Cloud VM — DS3_V2Standard), two servers are launching workflows, the others are for High Availability
Azure SQL DB configuration it can healthily monitor: 3 Azure SQL servers, 1000 databases per each (3000 databases in total)
Previous SQL and Azure related updates
Back in October, Microsoft released some updates for Management Pack for SQL Server And Dashboards. Just a few days back, they added more Elastic Pool choices for SQL Database. Microsoft also recently brought Python language update to SQL Server.
Microsoft is open for feedback from end-users to shape up the release of the final build.
