SQL Monitor 3

Supported platforms

Host Windows machines

SQL Monitor monitors both the host Windows machine as well as SQL Server instances. You can monitor the following host Windows machines:

Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2008
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows 8 (SQL Monitor 3.2 and later)
Windows Server 2012 (SQL Monitor 3.2 and later)

SQL Server versions

You can monitor the following versions of SQL Server:

SQL Server 2000 SP4
SQL Server 2005
SQL Server 2008
SQL Server 2012

SQL Monitor Web Server

Supported operating systems for the Web Server computer if you don't have an IIS server (SQL Monitor will install its own standalone Web Server):

Windows XP
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2008
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows 8 (SQL Monitor 3.2 and later)
Windows Server 2012 (SQL Monitor 3.2 and later)

If you want to add SQL Monitor to an existing IIS server, the following versions are supported:

IIS 6
IIS 7 or later

Supported browsers for the web application

Firefox 3 or later
Chrome 2 or later
Safari 5 or later
Opera 10 or later
IE 7 or later

If you experience slow performance using IE 7 or 8, try upgrading to IE 9, or using an alternative browser.

SQL Monitor Base Monitor service

Supported operating systems for the Base Monitor computer:

Windows XP (32 bit) SP3 or later
Windows XP (64 bit) SP2 or later
Windows Server 2003 SP2 or later
Windows Server 2008 or later
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows 8 (SQL Monitor 3.2 and later)
Windows Server 2012 (SQL Monitor 3.2 and later)

32-bit SQL Server instances running on 64-bit Windows machines are not supported by SQL Monitor, and some performance counter objects are not available. For more information, see this MSDN article on 64-bit Support.

SQL Monitor Data Repository

The SQL Monitor Data Repository requires an MS SQL Server 2005, 2008 or 2012 database to store the data it collects from your monitored servers.

Support for clusters

SQL Monitor supports Microsoft cluster servers. Other proprietary clustering server systems may not behave as expected and are not supported.

Hardware requirements and performance guidelines

The information in this section is based on in-house testing at Red Gate, and is intended to be indicative only. In your environment, the performance may vary.

Specifications for Base Monitor machine

The Base Monitor machine runs the service that monitors the machines and instances you monitor in SQL Monitor.

Processor
3 GHz dual core should be sufficient to monitor 10 servers (a server is defined as a host machine plus single SQL Server instance).
Physical memory
2 GB RAM should be sufficient to run SQL Monitor as well as Windows OS and other small applications. The SQL Monitor process itself should use approximately 400 to 900 MB, depending on the number of servers being monitored.

Monitoring more servers will require a more powerful machine; in our testing, a 64-bit dual quad-core processor machine with 8 GB of RAM could monitor 30+ machines quite comfortably.

Growth in size of Data Repository database

The Data Repository is the SQL Server database that stores all data collected by SQL Monitor for all monitored machines and instances.

Expect the database to use up to 150 MB per server (host machine plus single SQL Server instance) per day.
10 servers over 7 days will therefore increase the size of your database by approximately 10 GB.

If your monitored servers host a large number of objects and databases, the Data Repository will use significantly more storage space, potentially up to a maximum of 450 MB per day.

Creating the Data Repository database

Before installation, we recommend creating the Data Repository database manually using a SQL Server management tool with settings appropriate to your environment. This allows you to estimate the eventual size of your Data Repository based on the guidelines above, and set fixed autogrowth and transaction log size relative to your database size. It should help prevent autogrowths, which can negatively affect performance and contribute to physical file fragmentation. For more information, see:

Considerations for the autogrow and autoshrink settings in SQL Server

Recover from a full transaction log in a SQL Server database

You can allow SQL Monitor to create the Data Repository for you using the model database on your SQL Server system as a template. If the model database defaults are insufficient for the estimated eventual size of your database, consider creating the database manually instead. For more information about the model database defaults, see model Database.

The database is created by SQL Monitor using the SIMPLE recovery model. If you change to FULL recovery model, the database growth will be much greater.

Network bandwidth impact on monitored servers

Total network traffic (inbound plus outbound) : 10 KB/sec per server.

A server is defined as a host machine plus a single SQL Server instance. For multiple instances, the impact will be slightly greater per additional instance. For servers with a large number of objects (for example, 200 databases and 20,000 tables), the total network traffic may be up to 20 KB/sec.

Running SQL Monitor on a virtual machine

You can run SQL Monitor without problems on a virtual machine, but you should ensure that your VM host can deliver the required resources (CPU and RAM) described above. If your physical machine hosts multiple VMs, for example, then this will limit the resources available to SQL Monitor, which may cause slow performance.

If you locate the Data Repository database on a SQL Server instance running on a VM, then we recommend that you use a physical disk or partition rather than a virtual disk for the database data files. For more information about using mapped hardware in Hyper-V, see Optimizing Performance on Hyper-V.