Monitoring SQL Server Agent Jobs With SCOM-2

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Monitoring SQL Server Agent

Jobs with SCOM

Keeping Tabs on Maintenance Jobs


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IntroductionIn an environment where you work, there is a high degree of probably that you use Microsoft SQL

Server of some version of edition to provide a database to an application. In the same environment,

there’s a good chance, if you are a Microsoft shop that you are using System Center Operations

Manager (SCOM) to monitor your environments.

All good database administrators (DBAs) create jobs, plans and tasks to keep their SQL servers in tip

top shape but a lot of the time, insight as to the status of these jobs is left either unturned like an

age old stone or is done by configuring SQL Database Mail on your SQL servers so that email alerts

are generated which means you have additional configuration being done on every server to

configure this and it’s yet another thing to manage.

In this guide, I am going to walk you through configuring a System Center Operations Manager 2012

R2 environment to extend the monitoring of your SQL Servers to include the health state of your SQL

Server Agent Jobs, allowing you to keep an eye on not just the SQL Server platform but also on the

jobs that run to make the platform healthy.

This guide as are all my publications, dedicated to my wife Nicky and my three daughters; Madison,

Jessica and Layla who are subjected to living with me and technology and not always in that order.

AuthorsRichard J Green works as a Consultant for Fordway Solutions Limited, dealing in all things Microsoft

whilst specializing in delivering System Center solutions helping customers leverage their investment

in IT through Microsoft management technologies. Richard works extensively with Windows Azure.

He has an unhealthy obsession with the colour pink hence the colour choice of this book.

You can follow Richard on Twitter @richardjgreen or read his blog at focusing on Microsoft products

and technologies along with other digital ramblings at http://richardjgreen.net.

CopyrightThis book is copyright of Richard J Green and co-authors. No unauthorised copying of material in this

book shall be performed without the prior written consent of Richard Green or one of the co-

authors.

© 2014

http://www.fordway.com/http://www.fordway.com/http://www.fordway.com/http://twitter.com/richardjgreenhttp://twitter.com/richardjgreenhttp://twitter.com/richardjgreenhttp://richardjgreen.net/http://richardjgreen.net/http://richardjgreen.net/http://richardjgreen.net/http://twitter.com/richardjgreenhttp://www.fordway.com/http://www.fordway.com/


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ContentsIntroduction ............................................................................................................................................ 2

Authors .................................................................................................................................................... 2

Copyright ................................................................................................................................................. 2

Prerequisites for Configuration............................................................................................................... 4

SQL Server and SQL Server Agent ....................................................................................................... 4

SQL Server Agent Jobs ......................................................................................................................... 4

System Center Operations Manager................................................................................................... 4

Configuring SQL Agent Job Monitoring ................................................................................................... 5

Create a SQL Server Agent Targeting Group ....................................................................................... 5

Enable the Agent Job Object Discovery .............................................................................................. 6

Create a SQL Server Agent Job Targeting Group ................................................................................ 8

Enable Alerting for Failed SQL Server Agent Jobs ............................................................................. 10

Extra Credit Tasks .................................................................................................................................. 11

Closing Credits ....................................................................................................................................... 11


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Monitoring SQL Server Agent Jobs with SCOM

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Prerequisites for ConfigurationIn order to be able to complete the steps in this guide, you need to have some things in place in your

environment, nothing that you shouldn’t already have though mind you.

SQL Server and SQL Server Agent

It goes without saying that to monitor SQL Server Agent Jobs, the scope of this guide, you will need

to have a SQL Server that has a running SQL Server Agent. This can be either a standalone SQL

Server, a SQL Server Failover Cluster or a SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group.

The SQL Server Agent should be configured with a service type of Automatic for Standalone and

AlwaysOn Availability Group servers or to Manual and controlled by the Cluster Service for Failover

Cluster instances of SQL Server.

In this guide, I am working with SQL Server 2012 but there is no rule for this. You can deploy this

configuration with any version or edition of SQL Server and adjust the steps in the guide accordingly.

SQL Server Agent JobsAs the scope of this guide is configuring SQL Server Agent Jobs, it is fairly obvious that we need to

have some jobs to monitor. The scope of this guide is not to tell you how to create SQL Server Agent

Jobs or what jobs you should have but I have a blog post exploring the Ola Hallengren SQL

Maintenance Solution at http://richardjgreen.net/sql-server-maintenance-solution/ if you want

more information.

System Center Operations Manager

In this guide, I am working with System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 which is the latest

release, ignoring the System Center vNext Technical Preview recently made available.

There is no limitation for this to only work with SCOM 2012 R2 and it would be entirely possible todo this with older versions of SCOM. The only limiting factor with SCOM is Management Packs. In

order to be able to follow this guide, you need to have the SQL Server Management Packs for the

appropriate versions of SQL Server installed.

The System Center Management Pack for SQL Server supporting SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2008 R2 and

2012 can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=10631.

The System Center Management Pack for SQL Server 2014 can be downloaded from

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42573.

http://richardjgreen.net/sql-server-maintenance-solution/http://richardjgreen.net/sql-server-maintenance-solution/http://richardjgreen.net/sql-server-maintenance-solution/http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=10631http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=10631http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=10631http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42573http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42573http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42573http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=10631http://richardjgreen.net/sql-server-maintenance-solution/


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Configuring SQL Agent Job Monitoring

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Configuring SQL Agent Job MonitoringWith all of our prerequisite talk out of the way, we can now get to the real topic, how to configure

this monitoring.

By default, the SQL Server Management Pack for SCOM monitors SQL Server health but with respect

to the SQL Server Agent, it only monitors the health of the Agent service and not what runs inside

that agent.

Create a SQL Server Agent Targeting Group

To get started, you need to make a choice: do you want to monitor the SQL Server Agent for a

selection of your servers or for all of them?

I made the choice that I want to only target a sub-set of servers for this monitoring so the first step is

to create a group for these servers. In SCOM, we create a group from the Groups node of the

Authoring pane in the Operations Console.

As you will see from the screenshot of the group creation, the object that needs to be added is the

SQLAgent$SERVER object, where SERVER is the SQL Server server name.

If you wanted to include all SQL Servers in your environment, you could create the appropriate

Dynamic Members statement or you could ignore this step and apply the following step to All

Objects of a Class instead of to the Group.


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Enable the Agent Job Object Discovery

With our group created, we now need to turn our attention to actually discovering the Agent Jobs

and that is as the name suggests, done by an Object Discovery.

In the Operations Console, on the Authoring pane, open the Object Discoveries node and change

the scope of the Management Packs to be limited to SQL Server 2012 Agent Job. You will need tochange the radio button at the bottom of the scope dialog to View All Targets whilst doing this as

the Agent is not defined as a common Management Pack.

You should then see the Object Discovery Discover SQL Server 2012 Agent Jobs job which is disabledby default hence why we don’t get the statuses for our SQL Server Agent Jobs out of the box.

Right-click this Object Discovery and select Overrides > Override the Object Discovery > For a Group

and from the group picker, select the group we created previously in the SQL Server and SQL Server

Agent step.


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In the Override Properties as you can see from the screenshot above, we want to override the

status of this Object Discovery from Disabled to Enabled. Select the Override checkbox for the

Parameter Name Enabled and set the Override Value to True. Once you have done this, select OK to

apply the change.

The next part depends on your level of patience. If you are happy to wait, then leave everythingalong and come back the following day as that is how long it will take the Microsoft Monitoring

Agent on the SQL Server hosts to pick up the change to the Object Discovery and run it because of

the Interval on the discovery.

If like me, you don’t want to wait for that, simply restart the Microsoft Monitoring Agent service on

your SQL Servers and the changes will be pulled in immediately and the Object Discovery forced to

run at the agent restart.

We can check that our SQL Server Agent Jobs have been discovered by SCOM using the Monitoring

view. Click the Monitoring pane in the Operations Console and drill down to Microsoft SQL Server >

SQL Server Database Engines > SQL Server 2005/2008/2012 > SQL Agent and open the SQL Agent

Job State state view.

As you can see from this screenshot, the two servers that I included in the group have performed the

discovery of the SQL Server Agent Jobs and their status has been reported into SCOM as Healthy.

In the screenshot, there are three jobs per server, dbcc_checkdb_weekly and

defragment_indexes_weekly which are user created SQL Server Agent Jobs and

syspolicy_purge_history which is a system job.

Because syspolicy_purge_history is a system job that’s only purpose is to clear down the history of

SQL Server Agent Jobs history I am not actually interested in monitoring this. Furthermore, we

probably don’t want to monitor SQL Server Agent Jobs which individual administrators have chosen

to create to aid their work; we only want to monitor the company mandated jobs used for

maintaining our servers.


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Create a SQL Server Agent Job Targeting Group

So far, we are collecting the status of the Jobs from the SQL Server Agents into SCOM. The status for

these jobs is based on the Last Run Status monitor however right now, we are only seeing the status

and there will not be any alerting.

To get the alerting that we desire, we need to prepare another group to allow us to scope the usercreated jobs and to then allow those jobs to generate alerts.

As shown in the screenshot above, I have started the process of creating a group however this time,

the group is based on Dynamic Membership. By using Dynamic Membership, we can define here in

the group the Job Names that we want to monitor and based on the membership of our first group,

these will automatically be targeted and will be automatically applied to all our SQL Servers.

In this Dynamic Group, I have chosen to include Or expression groups for each of the SQL Server

Agent Job versions so that should somebody later add a SQL Server to our Agent Job monitoring

group that is running a different version of SQL Server that it will still work. This is covered briefly in

the Extra Credit Tasks task at the end of this guide but not a requirement.

Once we have created our new group, we can use the View Group Members menu option in the

Groups node of the Authoring pane in the Operations Console to check that we have correctly

targeted our Classes and that everything has been detected properly.


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As you can see from the image above, the user created SQL Server Agent Jobs that we designated to

be part of this Dynamic Group have been correctly detected confirming both that our Class Targeting

has been set correctly and that our expression to match the Job Name is working also.


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Enable Alerting for Failed SQL Server Agent Jobs

So far, we’ve achieved a lot by targeting our SQL Servers and getting monitoring insight into the

status of our SQL Server Agent Jobs but to get the full story, we now want to generate alerts for any

failures and because we are kind SCOM Administrators, we want our alerts to automatically resolve

which means we are using a Monitor for the SCOM educated amongst you.

On the Authoring pane of the Operations Console, select the Monitor node. In the Monitor node,

scope the Management Packs to SQL Server 2012 Agent Jobs which may already be the case from

our previous scoping efforts.

Right-click the Last Run Status Monitor and select Overrides > Override the Monitor > For a Group

and select the group that we created in the last step Create a SQL Server Agent Job Targeting Group.

At the Override Properties dialog as shown above in the screenshot, override the Auto-Resolve Alert

and Generate Alert Parameter Names and change both of their Override Values to True.

Once you’ve made these changes, select OK to apply the override.

You now have a solution in place to bring visibly to the status of your SQL Server Agent Jobs into

SCOM and you have alert generation for failures.


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Extra Credit Tasks

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Extra Credit TasksNow that you are finished, here are some extra credit tasks you can consider to make this even

better:

Repeat the steps in this guide for other versions of SQL Server such as SQL Server 2014 to

future-proof your efforts if someone in your environment decides to be cutting-edge and

deploys a SQL Server 2014 instance.

Configure a Notification Channel and Subscriber for the SQL Server Agent Jobs alerts and

have the alerts sent to your monitoring team or your SQL DBA team, whichever is relevant in

your environment.

Use Dynamic Membership on the first group we created in the Create a SQL Server Agent

Targeting Group step so automatically include all of your SQL Servers but just make that you

are happy that the health state of all of your SQL Servers is in a good place before you do

otherwise the people receiving your alerts might be a bit unhappy with you.

Closing CreditsI hope you’ve enjoyed this guide and found it helpful and please feel free to reach out to me via my

blog at http://richardjgreen.net or via Twitter at @richardjgreen if you want more information about

this guide or have any suggestions for how it could be made even better.
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Monitoring SQL Server Agent Jobs With SCOM-2