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

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 17, 2017
  I am very much looking forward to seeing the DWInsights Dashboard and setup. We are moving to production with our APS migration and would love to monitor performance vs our old Oracle platform.
• Anonymous
  May 22, 2017
  AM wondering why the APS monitoring solution does not have ability to use database mail alerts ? Have been struggling to find a reference around so we can use our own monitoring solution using the DMV's
  • Anonymous
    August 14, 2017
    Admin Console is the inbox interface that allows to monitor APS, and that solution does not include any alerting mechanism by design. When using SCOM to monitor APS though you can configure it to send out notifications based on events, as you would usually do with SCOM. the DWInsight Dashboard solution has a different scope, but since it keeps track of errors and warnings, you could set up your custom code to send out notifications whenever and error or warning is detected.Notification alert is a feature we have been thinking about for DWInsight Dashboard but have not implemeted yet.
  • Anonymous
    August 16, 2017
    The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 08, 2017
  How can we export objects like Table, SP's, functions from APS.
  • Anonymous
    August 16, 2017
    You can script out invididual tables or Stored Procedures by using "View Code" function. But not sure about exporting multiple objects.Vasa
• Anonymous
  July 28, 2017
  Any good data modeling tool for APS?
• Anonymous
  September 20, 2017
  Any update on the timeline around DWInsight Dashboard?
• Anonymous
  October 02, 2017
  Awaiting an update on this ? Can anyone provide some feedback regarding this from Microsoft ?