You have a Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance installed in your data center, you are doing analytics on your data with a business intelligence tool, such as Toad BI and things are looking good, right?
More than likely, yes, however to make the most of your data warehousing and business intelligence experience you want to be sure everything stays healthy. Enter the Microsoft System Center Operations Monitoring plugin for the Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance.
Why use System Center to monitor my appliance?
- Enables a drill down to view components specific to the appliance
What is required?
- Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance
- SQL Administrator account
- System Center Operation Monitor 2007R2 or higher
- Domain Administrator privileges
For those users that are familiar with Microsoft System Center Operations Manager, the addition of a management pack is a straightforward process. For me, a complete novice to System Center, I relied heavily on the detailed instructions that accompany the management pack which can be found on the same page as the management pack on the page System Center Monitoring Pack for Microsoft Data Warehouse Appliance V2. The guide covers all the steps you need to perform on both the System Center side as well as on the appliance in order to begin monitoring. The information was somewhat spread out in the guide so it is best to do a read through before starting.
Once System Center was set up and monitoring my appliance, it was easy to see system health and how individual components were performing. Of course, the major part of the data warehouse appliance is the SQL server and with the monitoring tool you can view health down to the table level, as illustrated below
When I set up my environment, I used System Center Operations Manager 2012 to do my monitoring since I was not familiar with any version of the software prior to this and wanted to use the latest version. The 2012 version has many new features and gives users options like Linux/Unix monitoring capabilities, templates for all dashboards and the concept of resource pools making System Center Highly Available out of the box. For more information about new features of Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012 visit the following: What's New in System Center 2012 - Operations Manager