Thursday, December 13, 2012

SQLSentry - new feature in 7 (7.1?) that old customers need to know about

So, we lost our SQL Sentry database server last week - thing took a dive.  And, oddly enough, we didn't get a notification from SQL Sentry, even though the database server was being monitored.

Grrrr.

However, from talking with their tech support (who, honestly, are pretty awesome), there's a new notification that can be enabled, that fixes that.  It's not on by default (though I told them they need to change that), so you SHOULD enable it.  

In the Navigator Pane, go to Shared Groups (Global)
Open Failsafe Actions (on mine, it's a tab on the right side of the app)
Add "Monitoring Service: SQL Sentry Database Offline", Send Email
Add "Monitoring Service: SQL Sentry Database Online", Send Email

It also seems like they've improved the way the monitoring services work these days - it was scary easy to add a secondary site that uses our main SQL Sentry database, but monitors only servers at that site.  It's also really easy to add a backup/load-balancing monitoring service in general - install the service on another box, point it at your main SQL Sentry database, and away you go.

May my pain be your gain.

3 comments:

Jason Hall said...

Hi Michael,

Thanks for posting about SQL Sentry!

I did want to clear something up for you though if I can.

The condition "Monitoring Service: SQL Sentry Database Offline" was actually not added in 7.2, but it was renamed from "Monitoring Service: Database Offline"

Some folks along the way were confused about its functionality, thus the rename.

It is actually enabled by default if you set up an SMTP server and default user using the setup wizard off of the help menu.

Without that SMTP and email information though I'm afraid there isn't a way to set it up by default, because we wouldn't know where to send it or how to send it.

Speaking of the setup wizard, you can actually run that at any time from the help menu to set up defaults for any new email address just to save yourself some time as well.

bourgon said...

Thanks for the clarification, Jason. My concern was that we didn't have that enabled, and we've had SQL Sentry running since version 2. (And maybe that's why it wasn't enabled - we predate the functionality, and the default when it was first added wasn't "enabled")

I know it wasn't enabled because of our database issue last week - Ryan was looking at it yesterday.

I just ran the Setup Wizard and did show an SMTP server.

Jason Hall said...

No problem,

I actually have to say that going back that far, there is no telling why it wouldn't have been enabled, but you are right. Once it is setup, we don't prompt to run the wizard again or anything like that for an upgrade.

Ryan has entered a feature to warn about alerts like this that you might want enabled if they aren't during an upgrade.