As I mentioned in my first post, I really don't have that much to say. It would seem that my team even has less to say about the life and times of an Operations Tools guy. It's surprising really. They are quite the vocal group but it seems they are a bit shy about sharing their thoughts with the masses. I guess I'm going to have to work with them on that.
So by this time you're probably saying “Is he planning on saying something?” As a matter of fact, I am! Today I wanted to call attention to a couple of great Microsoft developed tools that are publicly available, but are often overlooked because people just don't know they exist. The best part is that they are free downloads directly from Microsoft.com.
SQL Best Practices Analyzer
This is a great tool just released recently. Simply put, it allows DBAs to quickly audit for both recommended SQL Server configuration settings and database coding practices. A few examples of auditable items are:
- User objects in Master
- WITH hint specification
- Cursor Usage
- Database Backups (or lack thereof)
- AV's and Server Errors
- Unexpected Shutdowns
- Database SQL Options
- Deprecated built-in functions
- ORDER BY with ordinals
- and much more!
Whether your managing only a few servers/databases or an entire Enterprise, this tool can help you quickly identify where problems or inconsistencies exist. The first time we ran it here, we found all kinds of little things that required attention. Given we have developers all over the world building back end databases for MS.com, having the ability to find problems is critical to success.
Microsoft Enterprise Instrumentation Framework
Okay, so I'm big on the idea that there is nothing better than applications being smart enough to know when they have a problem. The EIF provides a framework for developers to build intelligent applications. It enables applications built on the .NET Framework to be instrumented for manageability in a production environment. This framework provides an extensible event schema and unified API which leverages existing eventing, logging and tracing mechanisms built into Windows, including WMI, the Windows Event Log, and Windows Event Tracing. While it does require the installation of a new service on the end point servers, it's lightweight enough to outweigh this. Additionally, there are several samples downloadable from MS.com (search for Application Blocks) to cover areas such as Configuration Management, Exception Handling and Logging. I'm not saying it's the perfect, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.
MSR
This last link is to the Microsoft Research download page. Honestly, there are a lot of cool things here, but I'd like to call out one in particular. Have you ever wanted to create a dynamic heat map of...well, really any data? Scroll down toward the bottom of the page and select TreeMap.NET. If you ever had need of an easy extensible method of producing heat maps, this is it.
That's it for me for today. Enjoy!
