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Looking for the SQL Server monitoring silver bullet?
The SQL Server Administrator's Console provides direct and effortless solutions for any data center to achieve superior results. You will find powerful scripts and informational articles for SQL Server administrators, architects, and developers here. There is also a SQL Server DDL, DML and configuration change monitoring tool that identifies, manages and measures change across the Enterprise: SQLClue. Please read on.
One of the most demanding activities in any data center is monitoring. The purpose of monitoring is to assure that the data systems are properly serving the organization. Sounds simple enough yet realizing this goal is difficult because many data centers fail to properly align monitoring with strategic business goals. More often the data center monitoring efforts are the result of several highly skilled and autonomous administrators and experts; each alone doing what they think is best. While there may be no silver bullet, there are monitoring best practices any data center can adopt to become better aligned with the business it serves. All of these best practices revolve around the opening of effective and reliable two-way communication between the data center technical staff and all other business interests.
Why is business aligned monitoring so difficult? In a nutshell, the answer is ineffective communication. Most often the communication patterns of an organization are cultural and deeply ingrained. In most data centers change driven by effective leadership is the missing ingredient for high performance organization communication patterns. In reality business aligned monitoring is not so difficult. A silver bullet is not required. It is finding the will within the data center leadership to effect business alignment that is needed. It is balancing accountability and trust; innovation and cooperation; measurability and urgency to lead a staff of highly skilled workers that have unique topical depth of knowledge beyond those held by the leader that is difficult. More often, data center leaders defer to the "let the experts do their thing" school of thought and then spend countless hours mediating between business leaders that are not getting what they need and skilled workers that are at least mildly annoyed when asked to explain actions already completed. This is especially true when the leadership was implicitly looking to the skilled workers to fill in the blanks.
Moving from monolog to dialog. Organizational change is not something that happens overnight. Steadfast adherence to a plan of action is required to pull it off. At the same time, every organization has different and ever changing needs that often do change overnight. The rate of change required to enable the organization to respond to external conditions is a major reason that effective communication is difficult. This real and important external impetus is too often a set up for a one way flow of communication: a series of monologs that afford inadequate opportunities and supporting information for iterations of questions, feedback and clarifications. The organization is listening to the drone of the markets and audiences served. The data center is listening to the litany of organizational needs. Data center energy and resilience is consumed by the efforts to translate business needs into operational actions. Highly skilled data center professionals function at or near full capacity to meet business expectations by applying skills, knowledge, interests and responsibilities that the individual can only assume will meet the stated need. There is insufficient time and capability for the organization to validate the actions of individual data center team members. Typically even the direct manager of each skilled data center worker has little capacity to describe, let alone execute or instruct others regarding how to carry out the responsibilities of the highly skilled IT worker. Job specialization and task complexity in the data center stifle timely information flow back up the organizational pipeline. Each highly skilled data center worker becomes a silo of knowledge and information. To maintain business aligned focus in the complex and dynamic data center environment, effective and reliable bi-directional communication across the organization is a fundamental necessity. This is what good IT leadership must master: conducting the bi-directional flow of information between the business and the technical implementers. Instead, organizations tend to defer to magic ritual and hit-or-miss intuitions of the highly skilled technical staff over a systematic and well led plan for effective communication. Just declaring "we will communicate better" will not make it happen. Communication must be part of the master plan. It will never pull it off if the business does not want it to happen. There must not be an acceptable alternative for meaningful communication between the business and the technical staff. Measurable steps toward organizational dialog must be defined and implemented. Only then can data center monitoring truly and succinctly serve the business.
Successful organizations use a project strategy to produce new and changed data systems. Projects are the only proven method for providing a business or other organization with meaningful software solution. This is to the exclusion of all other ways to implement software change - unless of course the organization is so unhealthy that software development is also crippled by poor communication practices - and therefore without effective leadership. There are many philosophies about how to best conduct a software development project. Good philosophies will embrace iteration and include documentation, time tracking and testing. That the same proven project based practices are not applied to data center operational monitoring and other activities is as commonplace as it is incomprehensible. If creating software change is broken, the organization stagnates and will likely fade from relevance - if it ever was relevant. Perhaps even cease to exist over time if the external forces can find better alternatives to legacy and stoic software solutions. If meeting the needs of the organization within the data center is not working, the effects on the organization will be immediate, relentless, and volatile. When custom software solutions are in use, successful software development is necessary for long term organizational viability. In extension, successful data center monitoring is necessary to maintain the ongoing business concern. Development and monitoring are connected at the hip to the overarching organization. They must be delivered consistently and harmoniously to that organization.
Top performing data centers use the same project strategy to provide new and changed monitors. Assuming the organization has found the key to unlock the doorway to data system changes, it only stands to reason that the key to effective monitoring will lead through the same door: to meet holistic business requirements define, design, develop, deploy and maintain monitors using an integrative approach that is fully aligned with the data system change practices of the organization. Even if - at the onset at least - monitoring projects continue to be defined in terms of what the data center administrators and experts think is best, a project strategy will immediately add visibility and measurability. With visibility and measurement the effectiveness of the monitors can be reliably assessed by the business leaders and other stakeholders. As a result, the business will have the information needed to set and correct the course. This is business aligned monitoring.
The benefits of project strategy integration of monitoring include improved two-way communications and sharpened business focused results that fully capitalizing on the knowledge and skills of highly skilled staff while avoiding the chaotic and often conflicted interactions of skilled workers in the non-aligned data center. Time will not be lost by technical experts trying to determine what they think the business wants and how to deliver those pseudo-requirements in the face of the fabricated requirements others have implemented. Time will not be lost by the business leaders and stakeholders trying to bridge a link between the available monitors and the business problems they need to solve. If the business did not effectively communicate the requirements there may not even be a link between the available monitors and presenting business problems.
Aligning data center monitoring with business needs is necessary and urgent for any ongoing concern. Integrating monitoring requirements into the same project strategy the business employs to communicate application changes and new application requirements is fundamental to successful, efficient and resilient data center monitoring practices. Here at The SQL Server Administrator's Console you will find relevant and elegant data center monitoring information. Your responsibility - if you intend to realize the greatest benefit from the information provided - is to align your monitoring practices with the business you support. In your search for improved SQL Server data center monitoring, do not make the mistake of overlooking SQLClue. SQLClue is more than the easiest and most powerful database configuration change monitor and configuration comparison tools available for SQL Server. SQLClue provides an advanced 'on-line' runbook that transparently enables integration of monitoring efforts in any organizational project strategy by effortlessly enabling and capturing the two-way communication flow within the data center without disrupting the current day to day routines of each technical worker.
This page was last modified on Tuesday, February 02, 2010 07:51:30 AM