I’m using the cloud based tool codenamed Atlanta to monitor one of my servers. There are two simple questions to ask about any tool. Is it useful? Is it annoying? I’ve found Atlanta to be useful without being annoying. It found things I’d missed without having me wade through a bunch of useless messages.
You can try this product for free by going here: https://www.microsoftatlanta.com/. A Silverlight enabled browser is required to run Atlanta. There are two components to Atlanta, a gateway and an agent. Each monitored machine needs an agent. You can have multiple agents reporting to a single gateway. Read the product information to learn more.
Here are some of the alerts Atlanta provided me:
Let’s drill down to the contents of these alerts. I had to do screen captures because I couldn’t select the text (which I think should be selectable in the final version) from the alert pane.
Alert 1
I’d totally missed that. It’s useful.
Alert 2
This is a four core machine with only one tempdb file. This is a useful alert, but something best discussed in a separate blog post on tempdb.
Alert 3
Most embarrassing! Yes, I’d missed this. It is a very useful alert.
Alert 4
Obviously useful.
Alert 5
Same as alert 4, useful.
There was an alert about a database that hadn’t been backed up. That is generally a good thing to know, but in my specific case, it was a false positive. I can’t blame Atlanta for that, though. The database had been restored from another server and is being used as a readonly copy. I didn't set the database to readonly - I used granted permissions to keep people from changing it for reasons that aren't of general interest. If this database was lost, it would be restored from the same backup. No need to backup a copy of a backup. Atlanta couldn’t know that. I won’t admit if Atlanta found a database that hadn’t been backed up that should have been – you never know who could be reading this blog!
As previously mentioned, I’d like to see the text of an alert message selectable so that it can be pasted elsewhere. I’d like the references to Books Online or the Knowledge Base to be clickable within the Detail tab. These are very minor issues. If you click on the Solution tab, the references are clickable.
I’m finding Atlanta to be a very useful tool and recommend that you give it a try.