SQL Server AlwaysON Monitoring

dbWatch allows you to monitor the status of your Always ON High Availability groups and check the state of the member nodes within an AlwaysOn cluster.

• Let’s start by adding a database instance in the dbWatch application.
  On top Choose Add database > Select MS SQL Server

• In this window > Specify the grouping of your instance, whether development, test or production.
  These groupings are the default, you can create any instance groups later.

• In the host field you can specify to input your hostname or the availability group listener name of your cluster.

In this case we will input the host: Asteroid1.
Input the port number.
Select your authentication mode.
Continue to the next page >

• In this window you will see that dbWatch automatically detected that the host belongs to a cluster named dbw-cluster01.
  Which consist of the nodes: Asteroid1 and Asteroid2.

Add the servers then continue

• If you select to install advanced monitoring which is recommended by dbWatch, you can choose an existing database or have dbwatch create one for you.
  But if you choose not to install advanced monitoring, it will not install any objects within your database.
  dbWatch will only have a select permission to gather the minimal data required for monitoring your instance.
  

• We’re now ready to install the dbWatch framework and add the cluster nodes in dbWatch.
  

We’ve successfully installed the dbWatch framework to the instances.

Now we go back to the dbWatch monitoring dashboard
To discuss the tasks available to monitor your cluster.

• Go to Monitoring Tab >

On the left, you will see the cluster name. Under it are the member nodes: Asteroid1 and Asteroid2

• Expand Asteroid1 > under the AlwaysOn folder

Displays the different tasks available to monitor the cluster.

• Database alwayson backup task > Gives the detailed report of your AlwaysOn backups
  It contains a list of the oldest backups over 48hours, database missing backups, recent database full backups and recent incremental backups.

• Another task is Database AlwaysOn log backup > Provides a report of your AlwaysOn log backups It contains a list of the oldest log backups over 48hours, database missing transaction log backups and recent database log backups.

• The health state task provides the health status of your different cluster groups and additional details if your cluster is on a critical state.

• The member state task provides the state of your cluster members and displays the member state history – details when a node went offline and online. This task is useful to investigate or backtrack what happened within your cluster environment on specific point in time.

• And lastly is the replica state task which provides information on the current host and history when the host became a primary or secondary cluster node. This task is helpful for DBAs as this provides information on how frequent the host server failovers to another server.