Documentation forSQL Sentry

AWS Availability and Maintenance

Availability

How do I ensure maximum uptime and reliability for the SQL Sentry AWS solution?

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.

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?

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.

Additional Information:

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.