APS Monitoring solutions

APS features an out of the box monitoring portal which allows users to review APS components health state as well as monitor resources consumption and workload executions. We're talking about the Admin Console. You can check out more on how to Monitor the appliance using Admin Console from the official documentation page.

Amongst the monitoring solutions there is also a dedicated APS SCOM management pack, which allows the appliance to be discovered and monitored by an existing SCOM infrastructure. Monitoring the appliance using SCOM offers some additional functionalities if compared to Admin Console, such as the ability to trigger alerts and notifications based on the status of the various components. Monitor the appliance using System Center Operations Manager is also well covered in official documentation page.

There may be environments where SCOM is not the preferred solution. In this case third party or custom tools can be used to monitor APS, although there is a pre-requisite. Any third party tool or solution to be used to monitor APS MUST be capable of running T-SQL queries against PDW. In fact, even APS SCOM monitoring uses an agentless management pack.

Users can also use DMVs to monitor appliance state, health and workload executions. Useful DMVs to perform this task are described in Monitor the appliance using system views documentation page.

Using system views users can also completely customize their monitoring experience, by building an ad-hoc set of queries to retrieve health information, and use the results to trigger messages or other events. Also results could be pushed to a staging database and used for analysis or offline monitoring.

A similar approach has been used in DWInsights Dashboard solution, developed by the APS Support and Field Team to allow for historical and trend analysis of workload performance, as well as appliance and database health (backup history, statistics, storage consumption...).

Stay tuned. We will be covering the DWInsights Dashboard in more details in later posts.

 

Supportability Notice:

Installation of agents on the appliance servers (both physical and virtual) is not supported, so any monitoring solution that requires installation of agents should be considered not supported on APS