Solarwinds does a good job while monitoring the standalone databases, but there are limited templates available to support the advanced database technologies like always-on, failover clusters, log shipping, mirror database. Below are some use-cases for which standard support is very much required.
1) SQL always-on -- For SQL, appinsight for SQL provide detailed metrics to monitor them thoroughly. But the connection string in the appinsight for SQL is fixed, it means that you can not connect to the cluster databases using agents. In case appinsight start supporting connection string, while applying the template to the agent (primary node), connection string may given to fetch data using cluster ip. This will limit the trouble to add the listener ips as a node, open wmi ports to it, open sql ports to it from additional polling engine.
2) Special metrics for always-on -- Below are the metrics which must be included in OOTB template for sql always-on monitoring.
| AlwaysOn WSFC Quorum State |
| AlwaysOn Availability Database Replica Synchronization State |
| AlwaysOn Availability Group Listener State |
| AlwaysOn Availability Replica Connected State |
| AlwaysOn Availability Replica Recovery Health |
| AlwaysOn Availability Replica Synchronization Health |
| AlwaysOn Availability Synchronization Health |
3) Mirror database -- In case of mirror database, database on one of the instance will always be in restoring mode. And no cluster ips are available in case of mirroring technology, thus template needs to be applied on both nodes. This will result in one of the template being reporting down always. There should be a template or intelligent logic available to handle this.
4) Support for log shipping metrics -
| Primary Status | Monitors collective status of agents for the primary log shipping database. |
| Secondary Status | Monitors collective status of agents for the secondary log shipping database. |
| Primary Time Since Last Backup | Monitors the duration(in minutes), since the last log backup was taken on primary database server in log shipping environment. |
| Secondary Time Since Last Copy | Monitors the duration(in minutes), since the last log backup was copied on secondary database server in log shipping environment. |
| Secondary Time Since Last Restore | Monitors the duration(in minutes), since the last log backup was restored on secondary database server in log shipping environment. |
| Secondary Last Restored Latency | Monitors duration(in minutes) from the creation of the last backup to restore of the backup in log shipping environment. |
