AWS Availability and Maintenance
Availability
How do I ensure maximum uptime and reliability for the SQL Sentry AWS solution?
- Ensure you are following the recommended SQL Sentry database maintenance.
- Follow Best Practices for Amazon EC2.
- Include the SQL Sentry database in your existing disaster recovery plans.
- Consider installing an additional monitoring service.
- See the Monitoring Service Load Balancing article for additional information.
- Consider using availability groups.
- Monitor the SQL Sentry database server and other replica(s).
- You should monitor the SQL Sentry database server with SQL Sentry.
- The first SQL Sentry database is included for free.
- Refer to our documentation on License Management and Installation Recommendations for more information.
- The SQL Sentry software is not Region and Availability Zone aware.
- Refer to AWS documentation on Regions and Availability Zones for additional information on these topics.
Additional Information:
- Adding the SQL Sentry Database to an Availability Group
- Configure a SQL Server Always On Availability Group (AWS documentation)
- Test the Cluster and Availability Group (AWS documentation)
- Amazon RDS for SQL Server Now Supports Always On Availability Groups (AWS documentation)
- Using Windows Server Failover Clustering (WSFC) and SQL Server Always On Availability Groups (AWS documentation)
Health Checks
How do I know if the SQL Sentry monitoring system has an issue?
- There are Failsafe Error Conditions which check for errors related to the SQL Sentry monitoring service.
- There are many Failsafe Conditions available for the monitoring service including SQL Sentry Database Offline, Performance Collection Failed, Send Heartbeat Error, Synchronization Error, and more.
- See the Failsafe Conditions article for details and a complete list of available conditions.
- Check the Monitoring Services List to view the status of a SQL Sentry monitoring service.
How do I detect server security certificate expiration?
- While we do not create certificates by default, you have the option to use them in the Connection screen. Please see the Connecting to an Installation article for additional information on this option.
- For AWS-specific information, please see the Working with Server Certificates topic which includes a command to retrieve the expiration date.
How do I detect storage capacity issues?
- SQL Sentry contains storage-related Advisory Conditions (SQL File Auto-growth Disabled, SQL File Auto-growth Exceeds Free Space, Windows Volume Exhaustion Date Changed, and Windows Volume Forecasted Exhaustion Within 90 Days included out-of-box) to create Alerts for storage-related conditions.
- The Disk Space tab in Performance Analysis contains information about disk space utilization within your environment.
- The Disk Forecasting feature on the Disk Space tab provides advanced insights into future storage capacity needs.
- See the Introducing Storage Forecasting with SQL Server Machine Learning Services blog post for additional details.
How do I integrate CloudWatch with SQL Sentry?
- CloudWatch may be used to monitor the EC2 instance; however, we do not directly integrate with CloudWatch at this time.
Additional Information: See the Amazon CloudWatch documentation for details on monitoring your AWS resources and applications.
Backup and Recovery
What do I need to know about backing up the SQL Sentry database?
- You should follow a regular backup schedule of the SQL Sentry database.
- Incorporate the SQL Sentry database into your existing backup and recovery strategy to meet your business requirements.
- Refer to the Microsoft documentation for a complete overview of SQL Server Backups.
Additional Information: When monitoring the SQL Sentry database with SQL Sentry, you should build a custom event view to see all backup failures.
Routine Maintenance
How do I know when a new build of SQL Sentry software is available?
- As noted in the Upgrading SQL Sentry article, the SQL Sentry client notifies you when an update is available, if the client has internet access.
How do I upgrade the SQL Sentry software?
- See the Upgrading SQL Sentry article for step-by-step instructions.
What type of Maintenance is recommended for SQL Sentry?
- See the SQL Sentry Database Maintenance article for information on weekly and nightly maintenance recommendations concerning index rebuilds, database integrity checks, index defragmentation, and configuring the SQL Sentry database maintenance window.
- For information about SQL Sentry database growth, see the Data Capacity Planning article.
Emergency Maintenance
There is a possibility of data loss in the SQL Sentry database if the system goes down. Follow best practices for backups and recovery to minimize potential data loss in an emergency situation.
- Remember to check the current AWS status through the Service Health Dashboard.
- Use the AWS Personal Health Dashboard for a personalized view of service health, events, proactive notifications, detailed troubleshooting guidance, and more.
- The SQL Sentry AWS solution uses EBS storage and EC2 — check the status page for those items.
- Follow Amazon EC2 Best Practices to prepare for successful failover if you need to replace an EC2 instance.
Additional Information:
- Troubleshooting Amazon Relational Database Services (RDS) (AWS documentation)
- Amazon EC2 Troubleshooting Windows Instances (AWS documentation)
- Amazon EC2 Troubleshooting Linux Instances (AWS documentation)
Important: Should the system go down, it's important to ensure all services are running correctly once it is back up. SQL Server may have stopped, ensure it has restarted on the SQL Sentry database server. Different components may come back online in an unexpected order. You should restart all SQL Sentry monitoring services to confirm that there are good connections and everything is running fully.