Technical preview 2 of the new SQL management packs are out for preview, get them here.
Updates:
Dashboards
Improved Dashboards performance
Fixed issue: Regular\Virtual group tile will show 0 objects if user adds a new group before the previous one has been saved
Fixed issue: virtual group filtering for Generic Distributor does not work
Fixed issue: tooltips on some menus appear in unexpected places
Fixed issue: Web Console is crashing upon right-clicking the Hamburger menu
Fixed issue: button captions are cropped in some dashboard localization packs
Fixed issue: instance dashboard displays data for the item that is the first in the list if no items appear after applying a filter
Fixed issue: the first group object is not in focus after clearing “Filter” field if there were no search results
Fixed issue: Summary dashboards appear to be in a strange state if one installs only Dashboards MP without SQL MPs
Fixed issue: Bulk Add Tiles does not trigger the refresh action
Fixed issue: object and alert counters of Virtual groups containing real groups display zeros
Fixed issue: an error appears in Web Console when using keyboard for navigation in “Add Aggregated Monitor” dialog
Fixed issue: unexpected scrolling behavior in the instance view when using mouse scroll
Fixed issue: markup of the dialog for adding classes gets broken when the scrollbars are displayed
Fixed issue: wrong width value of the Edit dialog
Fixed issue: there is no refresh action after saving the edited Virtual Group configuration
Fixed issue: white-screen exception when working with a dialog in Web Console
Fixed issue: datacenter and instance queries fail when a special set of classes is selected
SQL Server 2016 / 2014 / 2012 /2008 / 2005
Added support for configurations where computer host names are longer than 15 symbols
Added “Event ID” to descriptions of all the alerts generated by the alerting rules
Deprecated “Run As Account does not exist on the target system, or does not have enough permissions” rule
Added 2 rules for alerts generating when there are problems with execution of the monitoring workflows scripts on the following agents: “MSSQL: Monitoring failed” and “MSSQL: Monitoring warning”
Added “MSSQL 2016: Discovery warning” rules to generate alerts when there are non-critical problems with execution of the discovery scripts (warning events in the Operations Manager log)
Changed “MSSQL 2016: Discovery failed” rules to generate alerts for only critical errors during executing discovery scripts
Improved error logging in the MP scripts
Fixed some issues in the scripts, which could lead to unstable work with WMI
Fixed the issue when not all available performance counters were presented at “All Performance Data” view in Memory-Optimized Data sub-folder
Added a new overridable parameter to monitor “Stale Checkpoint File Pairs Ratio” in order to ignore databases having the number of checkpoint file pairs less than the threshold (300 by default)
Made “Resources Pool Memory Consumption (rollup)” enabled by default
A preview has been released for the Windows Server 2016 Guarded Fabric management pack it is available for download here.
The Windows Server 2016 Guarded Fabric Management Pack enables discovery and monitoring of guarded hosts and Host Guardian Service instances in your environment with System Center Operations Manager. The alerts surfaced by this management pack will help you quickly detect and remediate service availability issues with the Host Guardian Service and Hyper-V host misconfigurations that could prevent you from succesfully starting up shielded VMs. Please note that this is a preview release of the management pack and is not suitable for production deployments.
An update to the SQL management packs Community Technical Preview is now available here.
There have been additions for SQL Server 2016 SSRS and SSAS and minor improvements to the other existing management packs. Hopefully when this reaches public release it will avoid the issues of previous SQL mp versions.
Version 6.7.0.0 of the Community Technical Preview 2 for the SQL management packs have been released, they are available for download here.
Microsoft seems to be very cautions now with releases of the SQL MP which is good considering the issues with the last 4 live versions,
What’s new?
New Releases
MP for SSAS 2016
MP for SSRS 2016 (Native Mode)
Updates and fixes
SQL Server Dashboards
Added a feature to support Virtual Groups (groups defined by classes, not by real group instance). This will help users with partial access to use our predefined dashboards.
Added a feature to Bulk Add tiles from the class definition.
Added a feature to ignore some states while calculating the worst state for the Datacenter View State Tile; added a feature to set this ignorance up for each group
Added a feature to show/hide Instance path in the list on the Instance view
Added instance path to the Instance Details
Implemented deferred loading of the instance tiles to make the instance view operation faster
Implemented a new format for Dashboards configuration providing a smaller size and a single binding
Implemented a converter from old to new format providing preservation of user changes
Improved error reporting
Improved performance of initial load process
Improved data sources performance
Improved performance of instance selection (made it asynchronous)
Improved performance of Datacenter and Instance View Tiles, loading and loaded animations
Fixed animation issues and minor visual glitches (positioning, size of elements, fonts, main loading animation)
Updated Summary dashboard
“Known issues and Troubleshooting” section of the guide is updated
SQL Server 2016 / 2014
Fixed Smart Admin policies monitoring
Fixed Always On Database replica discovery incorrect behavior; fixed Always On policies discovery and monitoring
Fixed Database policies discovery and monitoring
Fixed and optimized CPU Usage monitoring scripts (the issue appeared when only one core was assigned)
Added support for more than 32 processors count in CPU Usage monitoring.
SQLPS module is now used for the tasks instead of deprecated SQLPS.EXE
Implemented FILESTREAM filegroup monitoring
FILESTREAM is now supported on the summary dashboard
Multiple Ports are now supported in SQL Server TCP/IP parameters
Fixed error occurring when no port is specified in SQL Server TCP/IP parameters
Fix filegroup read-only state discovery
Fixed RunAs profiles mapping for some workflows
Added support for new SQL Server 2016 Memory-Optimized Data implementation
Implemented support for TLS 1.2 in connection logic
Implemented support for different client drivers in connection logic
Updated connection logic error logging
Updated Availability Group Automatic Failover monitor
Added rules to collect new Always On performance counters
Updated SMO usage in Always On workflows to support the new connection logic
Upgraded the used PowerShell version to 3+, since SQL Server 2016 uses .Net 4 Runtime
Fixed issue: CPU usage monitor ignored SQL server limitations on CPU core count
Fixed display strings and Knowledge Base articles
Fixed error reporting in the scripts
Fixed threshold percentage comparison of deactivated subscriptions workflow in Distributor.
SQL Server 2016 / 2014 / 2012 / 2008 Replication
Reviewed threading implementation
Fixed issue: Distributor Discovery could fail for Replication
Fixed error logging, added more details
Fixed “Availability of the Distribution database” monitor issue: added missing overridable parameter
Assigned SDK profile to the Replication Database Health Discovery
Fixed replication monitoring issue: compatibility with SQL 2005 as a part of Replication
Fixed Publisher Discovery issue: unable to cast object of type ‘System.DBNull’ to type ‘System.String’
Added timeout support for .Net modules
Fixed issue: SQL Server Event Log Collection Target was not discovered Associate due to invalid path in DataSource
Fixed Replication Agent State monitor type cookdown issue
Fixed issue: failing replacement warning in “One or more of the Replication Agents are retrying on the Distributor” monitor
Dashboards fixes: added bindings to the tiles; added Datacenter Classes (L1 dashboard for Replication)
Fixed upgradeability
Fixed Knowledge Base articles and display strings
Updated Known Issues and Troubleshooting section of the guide
This posting will be updated as more features come to light
At first glace there isn’t a whole lot new floating around, the administration pane has the following, Tune Management Packs and Partner Solutions:
Tune Management Packs
This feature will show which management packs are generating the most noise.
Once alerts are populating the Tune Management pack view will give you an overview of how many alerts are being generated by each management pack, filtered by a date range you specify. Unfortunately you cannot choose a filter such as “previous week”
Clicking the Tune Alerts task will display a list of the alerts from that management pack with count, location, type and name. You can access the rule / monitor settings directly from this location to make it easy to reduce noise.
Partner Solutions
This feature is actually from one of the later 2012 UR’s but I’ll keep it here due to it being relatively unnoticed. Partner solutions gives a nice view into the 3rd party management packs that are available, it’s easier to than the marketplace and less hassle then trawling through search engines. I’d like to see more from this feature.
Console optimization
Some improvements have been made to the console this should be especially noticeable in environments with heavy load on the databases. Hopefully this mean less “busy” in the bottom left corner.
Alert view is optimized to load efficiently
Alert tasks and alert details in alert view is optimized to load efficiently
Context menus of an alert in alert view is optimized to load efficiently
Improved scalability for Unix/Linux Agents monitoring
A nice addition for those with large *nix environments is that the supported amount of cross platform agents per management server has been effectively doubled.
This has been achieved by using the new Async Windows Management Infrastructure (MI) APIs instead of WSMAN Sync APIs. By default, Operations Manager would use the sync APIs. To switch to the new method you need to create a new Registry key “UseMIAPI” to enable Operations Manager to use the new Async MI APIs.
To enable the new Async MI APIs – create a Registry key “UseMIAPI” under HKLM:\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft Operations Manager\3.0\Setup
