In another blog I documented how to deploy a Cloud Proxy appliance so that you can monitor Services in an operating system. You can check that out here ‘VMware Aria Operations Cloud Proxy Deployment‘
For the following post I want to demonstrate monitoring a SQL Server services on a Windows Server virtual machine.
In our test today, I’m running Windows Server 2016 with SQL Server Express LIte as a VM.
From within Aria Operations, I will want to now deploy the Telegraf agent. **Please take a snapshot and take any precautionary backups**
Locate the object you want to deploy the Telegraf agent to, select and from the ‘Actions’ menu select ‘Install’
Select the Monitoring Availability and Cloud Proxy instance below, in my case, I have a single Cloud Proxy deployed. Click Done.
You have a couple of options to ensure authentication to the VMs is taking place. Selecting the top option ‘Common username & password” will allow me to define. Selecting ‘Enter virtual machine credentials‘ will allow you to download a template and populate it with username and passwords to upload back into the appliance.
I’m defining local Administrator permissions for lab and click Next.
Screenshot missing but on the final click ‘Install’ and installation should begin and you may monitor status in Aria Operations
Not too long, you should see a successful installation
With a few minutes, the agent should start reporting in new object data from the Windows Server instance and discover services. If you go to Configure>>Application Services
If you click on the ‘discovered’ in the Microsoft SQL Server service, it should take you to a list of monitoring features.
Now that we have discovered services, we can select what we want to configure and even add from ‘Custom Monitoring’. To ensure we are alarmed if a SQL service was to fail, we will select ‘Microsoft SQL Server’ and select Activate Service
We will select ‘Microsoft SQL Server’ click Confirm
The right-pane will bring up the following configuration menu, fill it out and click ‘Save’
In order to make this work I did have to enable port 1433 on my SQL instance to get the DB Instance to communicate with the collector, please work with your server and dba teams.
Monitor the configuration
Once configuration is successful you should now find the server in inventory deployed with an agent and reporting it in application data.
You can now bring up the object in Aria Operations and find additional data being pulled in from the DB Instance
You may also dive into associated Metrics for the SQL DB instance and start monitoring.
I hope this was found helpful and please ensure you follow best practices by taking snapshots, following associated documentation for your GuestOS and VMware.
