July 3, 2013 at 8:37 am
I have spent the last month with a monitoring product, which shall remain nameless, that advertises its applicability to do network monitoring, application monitoring and database monitoring. I am not qualified to speak about networking or application monitors, but want to ask the list if my database expectations are out of line.
From what I have learned from using the product, its main feature is the ability to poll servers throughout the network and collect WMI bits from each server. What surprised me was that if you want any db server specifics, you must write your own queries to get to them! I had been using Glen Berry's scripts which are a godsend, and dumping them to table, to collect and persist monitoring results, but my expectations are that for this kind of money, one would expect that db and resource specific information built into the product, not listed as a 'feature' as in 'yes, you can establish your own metrics and counters through the product'. Being cast into a community of other customers and community templates is not my idea of support either.
Further, there is zero in the way of AI, or remedies or suggestions or indeed details pertaining to counters that have crossed thresholds. All i have been able to get out of it is 'Locks are critical' or 'Scanning is critical', but not the specifics of what is being locked how, or what resource is consuming cpu, memory or pipe. Drill down to the critical message gets you to a page with a giant gage, almost militating against getting related details in one place...almost makes me want to attach sparklines to Mr. Berry's suite of queries.
Shouldn't a for profit monitoring tool do this stuff for you, besides just collecting WMI and centralizing it?
thanks for bearing with me.
PS...paradoxically, I just noticed the Redgate message at the top of the forum and feel compelled to say my rant is NOT directed at Redgate.
July 3, 2013 at 9:49 am
good to know it's not us :hehe:
what's monitoring? It's looking for the state of the system and returning it. Alerting lets you know when threshholds are crossed (up or down).
What's broken? That's troubleshooting, and not necessarily what all products are designed to do or should do. Not all products find the sources of what's wrong, which is a complex topic and process.
July 3, 2013 at 10:06 am
Thanks for the injection of clarity...you are quite right, i was bemoaning the lack of troubleshooting insight in the product. It does do monitoring, but I was disappointed because I feel like its only feature is the centralization of the collection of counters, and we already get that with power shell with some light lifting.
I feel better already:-D
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