Tag: Redgate Monitor

A recent change made to Redgate Monitor to add a new alert for VLF count. This post looks at the change.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts

Tracking Virtual Log Files

Virtual Log Files (VLF) are sections inside of your physical log file (.ldf). These have no fixed size or number per file, but there can be many. The architecture of the log is explained in this doc and it varies according to a number of factors.

That doc also explains there are issues with too many VLFs inside of a log file. There are plenty of other posts about this (Brent Ozar, Kimberly Trip) and it is somethin you want to keep track of.

Redgate Monitor changes and grows every week with new releases and one of the resent releases (14.0.41) included a new alert for VLFs.

To configure this, select the gear icon in the upper right of Redgate Monitor.

On the configuration page, select the Alert settings. This will bring you to the details for your alerts.

There are a number of items on the Alert Settings page, but scroll down to the bottom of the SQL Server Alerts section. The Virtual log file count is the last alert.

The default setting is to raise multiple alerts here. The settings are:

• low: 100
• medium: 300
• high: 1000

These may or may not be appropriate  for your system, and for me, I don’t know I’ve ever had time to worry about this and I might disable a low level alert and only have two, but you can decide what’s important to you.

The important thing is that if you worry about VLFs in your environment, you can get alerted and track this over time.

Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.

Redgate Monitor has grown tremendously from its early days and I find many customers using this to monitor lots of servers, like thousands. In those cases, some of tasks you might do to manage your Redgate Monitor server can be cumbersome in the GUI.

This post shows you how to get started with PowerShell to administer your Redgate Monitor Instance.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts

The Purpose of the PowerShell API

Redgate Monitor (RGM) has lots of configuration options that you can set. In any size estate, this can be overwhelming when you need to change settings for some servers, but not others. For example, suspending some monitoring for servers being patched or upgraded. While this can be done easily in the web interface, for more than 1 or 2 servers, you might want a programmatic way to do this.

The PowerShell API is designed to help you change your configuration in a programmatic way rather than clicking through the GUI. If you look at the main documentation screen below, it says the same thing.

Getting the PowerShell Module

To get the various PoSh modules you need, you need to go to your configuration screen and click the download under the PoSh API section. You can see this below, and it’s also in the docs.

While this downloads, you also need an authorization token from your install. This is also on the configuration screen and described in these docs. The PowerShell API section has the Authorization Tokens section. Click that and in this screen you can genernate a new one. Save this, as you can’t see it after generation.

From here, test making a basic connection to your server with a script like this one below. One of our solutions specialists wrote it, and it imports the module, sets the URL and token, and then tries a connection. If that works, you are connected. You can run the Get-RedgateMonitorMonitoredObject as well. This gets a list of all objects being monitored.

Where to go from there is up to you. What types of things do you find yourself changing in Redgate Monitor? If there are a series of stops, then think about automating them. We have a set of example scripts that might give you some examples. There are things you might do from a list of servers like:

• add to a group (or move)
• suspect monitoring
• annotate them with an event
• set a tag
• copy settings from one server to another

With PowerShell, there are so many ways to program a script to do the thing you used to do manually. Give it a try with Redgate Monitor today.

https://youtu.be/eTlg1auKRUA

Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.

Redgate Monitor is growing to include more than just Microsoft SQL Server monitoring. We added PostgreSQL support in 2023 and that continues to grow. This post looks at a few changes we’ve added.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts

PostgreSQL Monitoring

When we added PostgreSQL support to Redgate Monitor, I assumed that we could monitor most types of PostgreSQL installs. I was very wrong. Apparently everyone that’s forked or used PostgreSQL in different ways has changed how a DBA might need to monitor the system. At first we monitored on-premises installs only, but that’s grown.

AWS

We now support RDS. If you search for bluebox, you’ll see a PostgreSQL RDS instance. If you click in the card, you can see the workload, and more specifics on this RDS database.

We also support Aurora, if you use that version. Search for pizza and these cards appear, the right one being Aurora. This is an AWS Aurora database, based on PostgreSQL.

Azure

We also support Azure Flex PostgreSQL database. Search for the pgtips database and you’ll see this card.

If you’re in the cloud with AWS or Azure, we have some PostgreSQL monitoring available for you, with more coming all the time.

Give Redgate Monitor a Try

Redgate Monitor continues to change and grow. Look at our demo system at monitor.red-gate.com and click the What’s New in the upper right, where you’ll see all the new features, like the PostgreSQL support changes.

You can also see the release timeline for more specific features in each version.

Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.

A new feature added to Redgate Monitor Enterprise automatically. CIS compliance is something many enterprises think about as their auditors use this as a benchmark.

If you’ve never looked at the Center for Internet Security, you ought to glance at them, and check out the benchmarks they have for many systems.

This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts

The CIS SQL Server Benchmark

You might get asked by an auditor how you know your SQL Server estate is secure. There are lots of things you can do, but an easy one is being CIS compliant. There are benchmarks from CIS for many SQL Server versions. You can download the benchmark from CIS as a PDF, go through it, and then start to compare that to your SQL Server instances.

That’s not complex, but it is complicated. Lots of moving parts, where do you keep the benchmark data, how do you compare it to your instances, how do you ensure it’s up to date or get notified if it’s not?

This is a simple job, but labor intensive, boring, and tedious. There’s a better way.

Redgate Monitor Compliance

We’ve added a compliance section to Redgate Monitor, which I’ve written about in terms of looking for older versions. However, we also have added to this section with a CIS Benchmark template.

At the top of Redgate Monitor, there is a Security section and Compliance is under this.

When I get to the compliance screen, on the right side, I have a drop down for the templates. We’ve pre-loaded the CIS Benchmark in here. I can select that to see how compliant I am.

In this case, I’ve filtered to the SSC servers and when I do that, I see that I’m mostly compliant, but just barely. I say me, but this is our IT group that manages the config.

There is a disclaimed at the top, which you should note. It links here, where the docs note that this is a template that cannot be deleted or changed. It can be duplicated. Note, this is only for SQL Server 2022.

If I click a server, I see the details of where and where not I am compliant. In tis case, things like database mail ought to be disabled.

I can’t change things from here, but I can export this as a report and work on remediation. If I want to set a template that is like CIS, but I have a good reason for an exception, such as the Cost threshold for parallelism set to something different, I can duplicate this template and alter it.

Summary

Auditing and compliance are becoming more important at many organizations, especially in light of the main data breaches and other issues that many organizations have experienced. This might even be required by insurance companies who want to ensure that you have not left open configurations that might become attack vectors.

If you haven’t tried the compliance templates in Redgate Monitor, give it a try, or have a play at monitor.red-gate.com..

Redgate Monitor is a world class monitoring solution for your database estate. Download a trial today and see how it can help you manage your estate more efficiently.