Disks

Monitoring SQL disks is crucial for businesses to ensure optimal performance and reliability of their databases. By keeping track of disk usage, administrators can identify potential issues such as low disk space, disk failures, or performance constraints that may impact the availability and responsiveness of critical applications relying on SQL databases. 

Proactively monitoring SQL disks allows businesses to take timely actions such as adding more storage capacity, optimizing disk configurations, or performing maintenance tasks to prevent downtime and maintain smooth operations.

This article will explain how SQL Disks can be monitored via BizTalk360 and get notified regarding is status promptly.

Setting up monitoring for SQL Server

To monitor SQL servers 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.

SQL server in users' environment may be utilizing its local disks for a variety of reasons. To prevent running out of disk space, it is generally a good practice to monitor those disks. Users can set up disk monitoring of the SQL server(s) and allow alarms to generate alerts when a particular threshold value has been exceeded.

For instance, users' disk size is 100GB and they want to be notified when the disk size goes below 50GB. In such scenarios, users can set up a warning and an alert to be aware of the status of the disks. In addition, users can check the status of the disks without having to actually see the monitoring section by seeing the visual cue next to the component names (in Green/Red color).

Setting up Disk monitoring

1. Log in to the BizTalk360 application.
2. Click 'Monitoring' in the navigation panel.
3. Click the expand button against the 'Manage Mapping' tab and select 'SQL Servers.' 
4. Select the SQL server from the drop-down for which you want to set up disk space monitoring.
5. Select the Alarm name (see Manage Alarms) from the drop-down for which you would like to associate the alerts.
6. Click the 'Enable Monitoring' button to set up monitoring for the disks. You can customize your alert to trigger a notification when the available disk space goes below a certain percentage (say 10% or 20%)
7. Click 'Save' to save the disk monitoring information.
8. At any point, to stop monitoring, click the 'Disable Monitoring' button.

Monitoring Clustered Disk

When setting up monitoring for a SQL Server cluster in BizTalk360, users just need to add the 'SQL Server Network Name' instead of the individual server names. BizTalk360 then determines if the SQL Server you added is part of a cluster or not. If it's a cluster, BizTalk360 begins monitoring the currently active node. 

In the event of a failover, where another node becomes active, BizTalk360 automatically switches its monitoring to the new active node. This ensures continuous monitoring and alerting even during failover scenarios, maintaining the system's reliability and ensuring that potential issues are promptly addressed.

For the business, this automated failover handling is crucial for maintaining data availability and minimizing downtime. By continuously monitoring the active node and seamlessly monitoring to the new active node during failover events, BizTalk360 helps in ensuring business continuity and minimizes the risk of data loss or service disruption.

For example, consider two BizTalk servers, BTS1 and BTS2. BTS2 is equipped with three disks - C, G, and E. BTS1 only has disk C, which is shared between both servers. Currently, BTS2 serves as the active node, and you're monitoring disks C, G, and E. If BTS2 goes down and BTS1 becomes active, then monitoring of the shared disk C will seamlessly continue without interruption.

Monitoring Disk in AlwaysOnGroup Server

SQL Server Always On Availability Groups (AG) provides automatic failover and data replication across multiple nodes, reducing the risk of downtime and data loss.

BizTalk Server heavily relies on SQL Server for storing configuration data and tracking messages. If the SQL databases become unavailable, BizTalk operations can be severely impacted. BizTalk360 enhances SQL Server AG monitoring by seamlessly tracking the health of the availability group, detecting failover events, and ensuring the active primary replica is always monitored without manual intervention.  

To Monitor the Always on Group you need to add the “Availability group name and SQL instance” in the Add SQL Server page. Once the Group is configured the available nodes will be listed for Monitoring. You can choose either the primary or secondary nodes for Monitoring. In this case, all the nodes under the availability group will be in an Active state. 

For example: Let's consider an organization that uses BizTalk Server with SQL Server Always On for its BizTalkMgmtDb, BizTalkMsgBoxDb, and other databases. The availability group consists of two SQL Server instances, SQL1 (primary) and SQL2 (secondary). SQL1 is the active primary replica, and BizTalk360 is monitored in it. If SQL1 goes down, due to unexpected hardware failure then SQL2 automatically becomes the new primary replica.

BizTalk360 detects the failover and seamlessly switches monitoring to SQL2 without requiring manual intervention. And alerts will be triggered and sent to the configured email ID and notification channel.

Dashboard and Notifications

Once the SQL server disks are mapped for monitoring, the health status of the disks will be shown in dashboard in a graphical tree view.  If the threshold values configured for disks mapped are violated, it will be listed in the errors and warnings along with the associated alarms. You can also navigate to the respective server's disks on clicking them.

For AlwaysOnGroup, the primary node indication will be shown in the Dashboard.

In order to receive email notifications from BizTalk360 on the threshold violation alerts, you 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. You will receive an email notification with the exact details of the status of the SQL server disks.