Service Level Dashboard and Moving the Data Warehouse Database

If you have deployed the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Service Level Dashboard in your environment, you have probably noticed our documentation doesn’t provide any reference or guidance if you decide to move the Operations Manager Data Warehouse database, or the SLDSessionDB database to a new SQL Server. This is assuming that you have not installed SQL on the same server hosting Windows SharePoint Services, and instead have distributed your workload. This article is to help you understand what is involved and how to avoid impacting the continued use of your Service Level Dashboard. Just know that performing this exercise will not require you to perform a re-install of the SLD, however it will require some up-front planning and preparation. 

Here are a summary of steps:

1. Stop the Windows SharePoint Services services and World Wide Web Publishing Service service on your WSS 3.0 server hosting the SLD.
2. If moving the Operations Manager Data Warehouse database to a new server, perform the SQL backup and restore steps as documented here on MSDN. 
3. If moving the Service Level Dashboard database (SLDSessionDB) to a new server, perform the SQL backup and restore steps as documented here on MSDN.
4. Verify the permissions for the SLDSessionDB or Operations Manager Data Warehouse database (depending on which one you moved).
5. Modify the SLD SharePoint Web Part web.config file to reference the new SQL Server. 
6. Restart the WWW and Windows SharePoint Services services.

If you like most of my customers and installed the Service Level Dashboard on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, then you will want to stop the Windows SharePoint Services services and the World Wide Web Publishing Service service. Then you can proceed with moving the SLD database or the Operations Manager Data Warehouse database (if moving the Data Warehouse database, be sure to follow the steps here in the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Operations Administrators Guide). After you successfully backup and restore the database or databases to the destination server, we need to verify the security permissions and ensure they are retained.    

For the Data Warehouse database, verify the following permissions:

1. The Operations Manager Service Level Dashboard Application Pool Identity domain user account is a member of the SLDReader role.
2. The Operations Manager Service Level Dashboard Application Pool Identify domain user account has login permissions on the SQL Server. Database Role Membership should be public and SLDReader. 
3. The SLDReader role is an associated security database role. 

For the SLDSessionDB database, verify the following permissions:

1. The Operations Manager Service Level Dashboard Application Pool Identity domain user account has login permissions on the SQL Server. Database Role Membership should be db_owner.

To configure the SLD SharePoint Web Part to reference the new SQL Server hosting either database, you will need to edit the Web.Config file for the SLD SharePoint site. You can find the config file for this instance of SharePoint in the following location – ietpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\51918. The entry defining the connection string for the SLDSessionDB is here:

The entry for the Data Warehouse database is here:

Once you change the Source= argument to match the new SQL Server, you then can proceed with restarting the WWW and Windows SharePoint Services services and verify no errors exist in the Application Event Log on your WSS server and there are no login authentication issues related to the Data Warehouse database or the SLD database on the SQL Server hosting those databases. If there are no related error events written, then proceed with testing functionality of the Service Level Dashboard.