When you use Operations Manager to monitor your SQL servers using the SQL Server Management Pack, there are some options that you will need to think about up front.    One of those areas is the SQL Agent, and SQL Agent jobs.   I will cover three conceptual areas: Out of the box experience...

I have had several blog posts in the past discussing how to write rules and monitors against multi-instance objects.  Special care must always be taken when writing workflows against classes where an agent can host more than one instance of the same class type.  Examples would be Logical Disk...

Update 11/29/2012:   This article is current as of the 6.3.173.1 version of the SQL MP.   Using RunAs accounts and profiles is an often poorly understood area of OpsMgr.  As I began to investigate setting this up for the SQL MP, I quickly realized how little I understood it.  Chatting...

The SQL Management Pack has been updated.  This is the biggest update to the SQL MP, probably since we added support for SQL 2008. Version 6.1.314.36 brings many changes to the MP – so you should give careful consideration to this one.  It is not simply a handful of bug fixes, for sure.  ...

This is a rare but interesting scenario… which can cause you to see and monitor duplicate objects (and get duplicate alerts) for specific types of discovered hosted objects that have a parent class which was upgraded from one version to another. For instance – if you upgrade SQL 2005 > SQL 2008, or...

The Microsoft SQL Server management packs for 2005 and 2008 will discover and monitor SQL 2005 Express edition and the Windows Internal Database by default.  This is often not desired, and causes a lot of noise in the management group, because these are not full blown instances of SQL, and some...

There have been a couple good articles briefly covering this topic…. you might have read them.  I will reference some below.  Config churn is basically, when your RMS is in an almost never-ending loop of generating config.  This can be caused by “less than optimized” management packs,...