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Released: Microsoft Azure SQL Database Management Pack (6.7.28.0)

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We are happy to announce the release of Azure SQL DB Management Pack! We have significantly enhanced the feature set in this release. Some of the highlights are support for Azure AD authentication, health monitoring for database geo replication, health monitoring for elastic pools, and performance improvements. You can download the management pack and find a summary of features at:

Microsoft System Center Management Pack for Microsoft Azure SQL Database

We have made improvements in the area of monitoring large number of databases. We would like to share some numbers that will hopefully help you setup the right configuration for your large systems. Even if you don't have large number of databases, the performance gains as a result of this work will be available for the lower end of the scale.

In our performance lab in Azure, every management server had the same configuration as following:

  • Azure Name: DS3_V2 Standard
  • Hardware: 4 Cores (Intel Xeon E5-2673 v3 2.4 GHz), 14 GB RAM
  • System Software: Windows Server 2012R2, SCOM 2012R2

Management servers used for launching Azure SQL MP workflows were dedicated only for monitoring Azure SQL Database. Actually, we used a dedicated management server pool for monitoring Azure SQL Database and just changed the number of management servers in this pool.

In Azure SQL Database, we had the following configuration:

Azure SQL Servers: 10

Database Elastic Pool (per each server): 5 (Basic Pool 50 eDTU)

Database (per each pool): 100

Total: 5000 databases (500 per each server)

Results:

2000 databases can be monitored by a pool having a single management server;

5000 databases can be monitored by a pool having 6 management servers (3 are used for launching workflows, the others are in standby)

 New Features and Fixes

  • Azure Resource Manager is now supported: the previous versions of the Management Pack used T-SQL queries to SQL Server system views to get information on the databases health and performance; now, the Management Pack can also get this information from Azure REST API (this is a preferred option)
  • Multiple subscriptions and multiple servers are now supported
  • Added support of Azure AD authentication
  • Improved monitoring efficiency: monitoring target is now defined by monitoring pool; WatcherNode class is considered to be deprecated
  • Added health monitoring for Database Geo-Replication
  • Added health monitoring for Elastic Pools
  • Added monitoring for “Average DTU utilization percentage” metric
  • Added regular expression filtering capability for Azure SQL Database instances and Elastic Pools
  • Improved SCOM Add Monitoring Wizard to reflect the new features of the Management Pack
  • Introduced performance improvements to the Management Pack
  • Improved error handling in Add Monitoring Wizard
  • Optimized performance rules notation: all Object Names are standardized; Instance Names are not used anymore
  • Updated the guide to reflect all the changes
  • Updated the visualization library
  • Fixed Server Exclude list filter: a server name could not contain whitespaces
  • Fixed display strings: Azure Portal naming style is applied
  • Fixed issue: some rules work only if more than 1% of Microsoft Azure SQL Database space is used

We are looking forward to your feedback.