I hope you've taken a few minutes to peek in on the nice refresh that's happened on a bunch of the System Center engineering blogs.  Good things are afoot there.  And if you haven't checked in, avail yourself of these great resources:System Center: Service ManagerSystem Center: Operations ManagerSystem Center: Virtual Machine ...

“Git-Go” is something we say in the South that means “right at the start”. I’ve seen several applications for on-premise systems that don’t have much in the way of diagnostics - the developers rely on a debugger, the event logs on the server and client workstation, and most of all, the ability to watch the system from end-to-end. This approach ...

At SQLRally, we brought along an iPad to demonstrate that monitoring doesn't have to be web-based to be mobile. We fielded a lot of questions about this, the most common one being, ''Whoa, is that native?'' No, it was not native... we were using remote desktop (RDP). While yes, it can be an extra step (or two, if you need to VPN) to go ...

Last week at SQL Bits #8 in Brighton, England, SQL Sentry (my employer) announced its partnership with DBSophic, makers of the Qure workload management suite. Qure Workload Optimizer is a tool aimed at analyzing a workload and providing suggestions to improve the overall performance of that workload. These suggestions can range from adding and ...

Today’s post is an unabashedly subjective plug for a bunch of unrelated tools I have come to rely on and love. I’m not really a “tools guy,” so there are no doubt better and worse tools for these tasks out there. I’m not affiliated with any of the vendors or authors. There’s no scientific method here - I just like these, and use them daily, and ...

Or, How Mirroring Off-Site Saved my #Bacon My company does most things right. Our management is very supportive, listens and generally funds the technology that makes sense for the best interest of the organization. We have good redundancy, HA and disaster recovery in place that fit our objectives. Still, as they say, bad things can happen to ...

This is the third installment of a series on our deployment of System Center at my workplace, emphasis on SQL Server MP. At this point we’ve got Operations Manager installed, and up and running, and we’ve been able to categorize all the monitored servers into production, preproduction, test and DR using groups that have dynamic membership rules. ...

I was fortunate to be able to attend the Vancouver BC SQLSaturday this past weekend, and it was excellent! Great sessions, good facility, well attended. Nice work, and a huge thank you to the volunteers that made that happen. One side perk: I got a copy of this terrific performance counters poster from Quest, which you can download as a PDF ...

Once you get past the basic architecture of a SCOM implementation, and build the servers, and so on, the first real problem is … well, noise. Suddenly (depending on how you deploy) the system will reach out, like marching army ants or some very clever cybernetic spider and find, and then proceed to yell at you about, every single problem on every ...

At my office we’re about 90 days into our implementation of System Center Operations Manager for Windows Server and SQL Server monitoring. All in all it’s been a good experience, and I’m really excited to have access to this tool. I’ve logged a fair number of years as a DBA on products like Idera’s SQL Diagnostic Manager and Quest Spotlight on SQL ...