When we look at how our database deployments are happening, we identify an ever growing number of servers and instances all servicing important services or why not? Custom applications.
What is it?
It is a combination of elements, those elements will allow for us as administrators interested in keeping a view of the health of the environment to connect to the system and check resource utilization.
The elements that come into play are:
- Utility Control Point
- Health Policies
- Utility Explorer
Each one of the elements above will allow us to then define a collection point, a database that will collect information, and that pretty much defines the role of the Utility Control Point. It collects the information on the configuration and performance of the target in a 15 minute timeframe. Therefore, special consideration and thought needs to be given as to where this will be located and the instance to use to have the UCP in place. The Health policies will identify thresholds of the values being gathered and whether or not to have us be drawn to that piece of data. And then, then Utility Explorer will be our central command of sorts presenting information in a dashboard and a general view of the information being collected. It is also the gateway to identify the values we configure for the policies.
There is more to come around this topic. Next step: How do we configure the SQL Server Utility?