NT Services

SQL NT Services monitoring involves overseeing the health and status of SQL Server-related services running on Windows servers. In a business environment, SQL Server plays a critical role in storing and managing data for various applications and services. 

Monitoring SQL NT services ensures that essential components, such as the SQL Server Database Engine, SQL Server Agent, and SQL Server Reporting Services, are running smoothly. This continuous monitoring helps maintain high availability of databases and ensures uninterrupted access to critical business data, minimizing downtime and maximizing productivity.

In this article, users will get to know about setting up monitoring of NT Services in SQL Server using BizTalk360.

Monitoring the NT Services in SQL Server

Windows NT services can automatically get started when the system boots up, while a few of them require manual intervention to get them started. As important as the services are to allow the system to perform its regular actions, it is important to monitor their status on a periodic basis. 

For instance, let us consider the IIS Admin Service. The IIS Admin service hosts the IIS configuration, and it is responsible to monitor the SMTP and FTP connections to their server. This NT service needs to be started when the server boots up. Accidentally, if this service does not start, users will be unable to configure SMTP or FTP and, in turn, any other NT services that depend on it will fail to start. 

Therefore, users need to set up monitoring for this NT Service, to send them an alert when the status is "Stopped". It is a general best practice to monitor NT Services that are important for BizTalk like the Enterprise Single Sign-On, BAM Alerts or the World Wide Web Publishing Service to be running and monitor some other services to be stopped so that resources on the Servers are not being overutilized.

Users can monitor the NT services for two different states - Running and Stopped. A Running state indicates that the NT service has been started and is currently performing the respective operations. A Stopped state means that the NT service is not running and needs manual intervention to be started. Users can set up the alerts for the different states to be alerted when there is a violation in these states. 

Setting up monitoring for NT Services

• To Monitor NT Services, users should select the respective SQL server from the drop-down and choose the alarm from the drop-down for which they would like to associate the alerts.
• The, they can select a single or multiple NT services and set the value of 'Expected State' by selecting the value from the drop-down. 
• For instance, if the current state of the NT Service is Running and they want to be alerted when it is stopped, users need to set the value in the drop-down to Running. 
• Users can also monitor the startup type and log on as an account for the above monitoring NT Services by simply clicking on the respective NT Service which opens the monitoring configuration blade. They can set the expected state for Startup type as Auto / Manual, Disabled, Do Not Monitor, Automatic (Delayed/Triggered start) and set the expected logon as Local user, Domain user, Local Service, NT Service account, etc. 
• Users also has an option to view the detailed monitoring results of the mapped NT Services showing its state, logon alert Start up type alert by clicking on the eye icon in the respective NT Services.

Monitoring Clustered NT Services

To monitor a clustered SQL NT Services effectively, users first need to add the respective SQL Server in their BizTalk360 Environment. Look into this article to Add SQL Server in BizTalk360 Environment. Once this is done, users can proceed to monitor the various components of the SQL Server. 

Once the server has been successfully added, the system identifies the active node within the cluster. The monitoring activities happen only based on the active node. For instance, when users set the expected state of "Service 1" to "Running," the system promptly checks whether "Service 1" is currently operational on the active node. If it is running, the monitoring status is marked as "Healthy." However, if "Service 1" is found to be stopped on the active node, the status is immediately changed to "Critical." Furthermore, if "Service 1" is not available on the active node, the monitoring status is set to "Orphaned."

Users can also set up AutoCorrect for this. In this case, when the service that is being monitored goes down in active nodes, then the BizTalk360 monitoring service will automatically try to start the service in the current active nodes. With this, they can ensure that there is no downtime of the service.

Auto Correct Functionality

With the Auto Correct functionality, administrators can set up monitoring on any "State-based" artifact and let the monitoring service try to automatically recover the artifact any time when there is a mismatch between the "Expected State" and the "Current State". For instance, administrators can set up monitoring on the NT service(s) and additionally set up the auto correct functionality for the Expected State of the artifact (which should be "Running").

Whenever the NT services go down/gets stopped, there will be a mismatch in the state and the Auto Correct will try to bring the artifact back to the expected state. If the operation is successful, the services will come back to the Expected State within the next monitoring service cycle (60 seconds).

Assuming you are still on the NT services screen, follow the below steps to setup Auto Correct for NT services:

1. Select the check box of the NT service(s) for which you want to set up Auto Correct.
2. Select the Auto Correct drop-down and select 'Running'.
3. Auto Correct will be enabled for the NT service(s) with the default values for Max Retry as 5 and Retry Count as 0.

Dashboard and Notifications

Once the BizTalk server NT Services are mapped for monitoring, the health status of the NT services will be shown in dashboard in a graphical tree view.  If the expected state and current state are in contradiction, then it is considered as a violation. It will be listed in the errors and warnings along with the associated alarms. Users can also navigate to the respective NT services on clicking them.

In order to receive email notifications from BizTalk360 on the violation alerts, users need to configure the SMTP settings under BizTalk360 Settings. Follow the steps in this article to be able to configure the SMTP settings in BizTalk360. Users will receive an email notification with the exact details of the status of the BizTalk server NT services.