How to find out why SQLMonitor cannot access (some) data

HugoKornelis

One of my clients uses (on my suggestion) SQLMonitor to monitor their production databases. On one of the servers (incidentally the server that hosts the SQLMonitor database itself) I always see a "Connection Failed (Internal SQL Monitor Error)" on the machine level in the configuration screen. And in the Analysis tab, there is no data for any of the Machine metrics or for the SQL Server metric "SQL Server: Processor time", though all other metrics appear to collect data normally.

When I click "Show Log", I only see a single error entry: "General / Processor : UnknownError.ExceptionMessage"

Is there any way for me to find out the root cause of this error? I assume it is either permissions related or I entered something wrong when I added this server but I cannot find out what it is and how to fix it.

And another (related) question: is there a way to ensure that I get alerted when monitoring of certain servers is fully or partially non-functional? I know that there are some alerts that trigger when alerting fails, but I am 99% sure that I never saw those alerts for this machine.

Russell D

Hi Hugo, unfortunately those are the exceptions that we get from WMI/SQL, in this specific case (General / Processor) WMI, so we're limited as to how much [useful] information we can surface. If you view the full SQL Monitor logs you may get context around the error as well, eg a connection failure, and its worth reviewing the windows event vwr logs on the computers in question.

If the machine is unreachable and meets your thresholds then I'd expect machine unreachable alerts to be getting raised, similarly with the SQL server instance being unreachable, but if the machine is reachable but one of the counters fails to collect (for whatever reason) its difficult to alert on that, it would probably need a large engineering effort.