Sentry-One

Should we stop using -- in SQL comments? Interesting blog post from Brent Ozar on whether we should stop using -- for SQL Comments. I use these comments a lot because they are quick and easy for me to type. I don’t like voluminous comments but this is a good point. If clicking the link is too much effort for you, he is saying you should do this SELECT * FROM dbo.Users WHERE DisplayName = N'Brent Ozar' /* This line is a comment */ AND Location = N'Iceland' ORDER BY Reputation DESC; instead of this ...

If you have an environment where you need to lock down Sentry One as much as possible, then this article should help. It is well known that the Sentry One service account needs to be a member of the Local Administrators group in each server it monitors, and also a member of the sysadmin role for each SQL Server instance. At the moment this is still a requirement, but if you can live without the Windows metrics, then you could run Sentry One in Limited Mode which will only gather SQL Server specific metrics. Some of our clients run in this configuration for security reasons. ...

Overview Sentry One is a great tool for monitoring many servers. For new installations, it can be a bit of a bind to add your existing servers into the tool to be monitored. I have written a PowerShell module to make this much easier and to validate that servers that you thought were being monitored, are in fact monitored. There is full documentation for the module in the Sentry One user guide which explains how to use the functions within it, but a brief explanation is shown below. it is worth mentioning that all the PowerShell cmdlets are doing is calling the SentryOne compiled PowerShell module provided when you install SentryOne. ...

I was at a client site recently and implemented Sentry One for them, a great monitoring system for SQL Server. It proved challenging because some servers were in a DMZ on a separate network and domain and some servers were in the same domain. All servers connected via a router and were firewalled off from each other with only the minimum ports open required for them to fully function and communicate. ...