Monitoring Stopped - NOT INFORMED OF THIS

PDinCA

If Monitoring STOPS, kindly send me a "REALLY OBVIOUS EMAIL" that states this has happened. "All quiet" doesn't mean my servers are OK, they may be subject to the painfully frequently occurring "Invalid Credentials" error, on an account that works for days then Monitor barfs the invalid credentials on an account whose password HAS NOT CHANGED and is set to NEVER CHANGE and has just about every permission in the world and STILL BARFS!

Sadly the Monitor Website isn't externally visible - I must Remote to the machine and don't have the real-estate/time to keep looking to see if Alerts are being generated - which happens to be the only sign on the Alerts page that anything is going on - A BIG FAT "STOPPED MONITORING" would be the most helpful addition to that page!

How about, instead of a "Help page" that says "you need these permissions", give us a tool that lets us plug in the domain account and generates, say, a Powershell script to "do the necessary to ensure that Monitor won't BARF!"

Sorry, I'm really frustrated :x with this Product - it isn't up to the standard I've expected/experienced for over 5 years as a happy Red Gate customer. Roll on v2.2 with the required scads of bug fixes we need...

benrees

Hi

Apologies that you've been having some problems with the monitoring stopping unexpectedly.

We've had a few people mention how useful it would be if they were notified when monitoring stops, so we'll be putting out an early release (in the next few weeks) with the very alerts you mention. I.e. something which informs you when monitoring as stopped.

Separately, if you get in touch with support, we can look in to the issue of why the monitoring has stopped in your environment.

Hope this helps.

Ben

PDinCA

Spoke to James and have emailed the zipped Base Monitor log files from Jane 20th through 24th for your analysis.

Many thanks.

qcjims

I was fed up with this product too. Too many issues to deal with and try to troubleshoot. I just simply gave up and will wait for these bugs to be fixed. Maybe version 3 will work a little better. For now, 2.1 is basically unusable in a large environment.


-jim

PDinCA

Thanks to James' research and the fact that I'm only monitoring 1 SQL Cluster (would like to monitor the demo, dev, qa, and 2 spares but have no $$$), we're persisting with the product and trust that some of the simpler fixes will be available in the EAP release coming in a few weeks time. The Product has potential but needs more "relentless testing" and exposure to more real and larger environments to make the jump to kind of product many of us hoped it would be. The level of effort expended by RG Support is encouraging, so I'm not at the "wait until 3.0" stage.

If you have the money, I found Spotlight on SQL Server very useful, except for the deadlocks it caused itself (really!) for 5 years on SS2000 and over a year on 2008+2000 - about 7 servers. Small potatoes to many of you full time DBAs, but for a pressed into DBA-duties SQL Developer, using both Spotlight and SQL Response (former name for SQL Monitor) gave me the graphical and educative along with the Alert-generator mix I needed to keep the servers up 99.9%+ over the 5 years.

If you're willing to help Red Gate move this product on, I'm sure you'll find it a worthwhile effort - I did with SQL Compare, Data Compare, Response, Prompt, Backup... Sometimes you get out what you put in... Anyway, that's my 2-cents...