Get extra insights on your Azure SQL Database data with these new tools!

Get extra insights on your Azure SQL Database data with these new tools!

We talked about the foremost vital KPIs for monitoring Microsoft’s Cloud SQL databases. We also examined how your information assets and auditing logs may be utilized to supplement metrics and provide additional information about database execution, utilization, and risk. We’ll teach you how to accumulate metrics and records from your database servers and analyze them utilizing Azure’s monitoring and reporting capabilities in this post. But to begin with, we’ll take a quick look at how Azure Monitor gives visibility into the action and well‐being of your databases.

An introduction to Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor is the main point of contact for getting information on your Azure SQL Database installations or any Azure resources to support your apps, e.g., virtual machines, web applications, virtual networks. The platform becomes available when you deploy a resource, such as an Azure SQL database. It includes tools for monitoring, analysing, and reporting on DBMS performance and activity.

The Azure Monitor Logs data store, on either hand, collects logs from SQL using Log Analytics workspaces. A workspace is primarily a centralized log collecting environment for those other Azure like Azure Monitoring for query, filtering, and monitoring. You’ll also route data to a workspace to determine them alongside logs and save them for extended periods of your time, permitting you to review lengthy speeds up the reaction.

To use all of Azure Monitor’s functionality, you want to manually set up your databases to publish measurements or logs to a Log Analytics environment. Later, we’ll handle using several Azure Monitor’s capabilities in further depth. Following that, we’ll teach you ways to activate diagnostics and audits on databases so that you’ll begin gathering database statistics and reports.

Gather metrics and logs from the Azure SQL database

All Azure SQL database capabilities provide diagnostics and auditing options for creating tool and audit logs and transmitting all data, particularly metrics, to another location for examination. Diagnostics may be enabled on each of your database servers and pooled databases that you want to monitor. This allows you to choose which logs to export to a Log Analysis work area and activate metric transmission.

Configure auditing for database instances

When you enable diagnostics on a database, it just creates resource logs. You must manually activate monitoring on your multiple servers and groups to supply and collect audit logs. Supporting your requirements, you will establish auditing policies at the server or database level. Server-level policies are beneficial if you want to use identical auditing practices for all data blocks maintained by a particular SQL server. Still, database-level policies provide additional flexibility over auditing rules per SQL database or group.

Navigate to the auditing page of the SQL server or specific databases or groups you want to watch to start creating audit logs. To activate server-level security, click the View server options link. Monitoring or activating azure SQL auditing to allow database-level auditing. Finally, make your Log Analytic studio the streamed destination for either option. Once founded, Azure will generate a replacement indicator setting by default with the SQL Security Audit Events category enabled.It’s worth mentioning that you may export database statistics and logs to various locations from Azure. Still, the Log Insights workspaces are the primary destination for monitoring data quality from within Azure.

If you wish to use a third-party application like Data dog to analyze data quality, you may set up an Azure Event Hub to transfer your measurements or logs. You may also archive data using Azure Storage.

Once you’ve activated debugging and audits on your database servers and pools, you can access all of Azure Monitor’s measurement and review tools. We’ll look at some of the numerous capabilities Azure provides as part of the Azure Monitoring platform for monitoring and analyzing SQL metrics and logs.

Azure Monitor has provided built tools for querying, analyzing, and alerting on critical database metrics and logs, which may be found in Azure’s docs. We’ll concentrate on the following topics in this guide:

·         Using Azure SQL Insights monitoring service to gain a comprehensive insight into database performance concerns.

·         Creating personalized notifications to advise you of crucial performance concerns

·         Using Log Monitoring to analyze SQL audit records to detect possibly harmful database activities!

View database performance using Azure SQL Analytics

The SQL Databases Analytics management solution that you can add to your Log Analyticsworkspace via the Azure Marketplace gives you a complete view of every one of your MYSQL installations and pools. You may, for example, utilize built-in dashboards to analyze database performance across multiple databases or drop down to a specific indicator to see its performance.

Azure SQL Analytics also provides a consolidated view of all resource logs, particularly SQL Insights logs, also known as Intelligent Insights, which can reveal trends in database performance problems. Intelligent Insights, for example, may automatically discover difficulties caused by DB resource utilization exceeding service level constraints.

Set up notifications for significant database issues

Although tools like Microsoft Azure Analytics can display database metrics and study resource logs on request, it may be tough to wade through enormous amounts of diagnostic data to identify actual performance issues that may affect your customers. Alerts address this issue by immediately warning you of significant performance issues as they occur, allowing you to break through the clutter and handle the case proactively.

You may set up custom alerts depending on metrics or log searches, including Smart Analytics logs, to warn you of performance concerns that require immediate attention, such as a DB exceeding available DTU limitations.

Examine the audit logs in Log Analytics

Measuring database performance is simply one component of ensuring that SQL instances can support your applications. It is also vital to keep an eye on SQL audit logs to maintain the security of application and client data. Once audit logs have been exported to your Log Analytics workplace, you can inspect them all by browsing the workspace and executing the search.

As with statistics, Azure Monitor allows you to see database auditing events using built-in dashboards, giving you a better picture of who is using your data and whether the information they are viewing is sensitive.

In Azure, you may track the performance of SQL databases

We examined how to gather and analyze metrics, resource logs, and compliance audits from your Azure Database systems using Azure’s monitoring tools.

About Enteros

Enteros offers a patented database performance management SaaS platform. It proactively identifies root causes of complex business-impacting database scalability and performance issues across a growing number of RDBMS, NoSQL, and machine learning database platforms.