After having been last updated four months ago, the Microsoft System Center Management Pack for Azure SQL Database has its Community Technical Preview 1 (CPT1) milestone. In doing so, the version number has received a fairly significant bump from 1.6.1.0 to 6.7.11.0.
In terms of system requirements, nothing has changed in regards to the supported underlying operating system which is still listed as Windows Server 2012. However, those wishing to try out the CTP1 release will need to upgrade to at least System Center Operations Manager 2012 SP1 as the RTM version is no longer supported with the management pack.
Microsoft is continuing to work on improving monitoring for a great number of databases with the company expecting to improve scaling by the time the management pack reaches RTM.
In terms of a changelog, here is what is new in Version 6.7.11.0 (CTP1):
- Azure Resource Manager is now supported: the previous versions of the Management Pack used T-SQL queries to SQL Server system views to get information on the databases health and performance; now, the Management Pack can also get this information from Azure REST API (this is a preferred option)
- Multiple subscriptions and multiple servers are now supported
- Added support of Azure AD authentication
- Added regular expression filtering capability for Azure SQL Database instances and Elastic Pools
- Improved monitoring efficiency: monitoring target is now defined by monitoring pool; WatcherNode class is considered to be deprecated
- Improved SCOM Add Monitoring Wizard to reflect the new features of the Management Pack
- Added health monitoring for Database Geo-Replication
- Added health monitoring for Elastic Pools
- Added monitoring for “Average DTU utilization percentage” metric
- Fixed issue: some rules work only if more than 1% of Microsoft Azure SQL Database space is used
- Introduced performance improvements to the Management Pack
- Optimized performance rules notation: all Object Names are standardized; Instance Names are not used anymore
- Updated the guide to reflect all the changes
- Updated the visualization library
The Community Technical Preview can be downloaded here. Microsoft is also inviting feedback on the preview which can either be provided on its MSDN post in the form of a comment or via direct email.
Source: Microsoft
