Have you had any problems with adding many database instances, one by one, manually using your current database monitoring solution?
Can your current database monitoring solution scan for all the existing database servers within your enterprise network and track every database instance available?
If you have experienced some of these problems, do not worry as dbWatch Control Center has a solution for these issues
In this blog, we will discuss how to add bulk database connection in dbWatch Control Center and utilize the Autodiscover functionality.
One of the unique features of dbWatch Control Center is its capability to add bulk database connections and the Autodiscover function, which detects all the database instances available within a specified network range.
dbWatch Control Center allows DBAs to keep track of the existing database servers within the enterprise and make it easy for DBAs to be able to add a substantial number of database instances in one go.
Here we have an example of a csv file format template for adding our database instances.
CSV File Format
You can add database instances in bulk. The prerequisite is to have a CSV file with the following format:
In the table explain the tag usage and its description:
Uploading Instance File
Open ‘Server’, choose ‘Upload resource’ menu.
A window will appear where you can upload resource files. Click on “Select Files” then choose the CSV file for bulk installation.
Afterward click on “Upload.”
After successfully uploading the Import.csv file,
You will see the 3 (highlighted in yellow) additional instances that we have added in our dbWatch Control Center dashboard.
This makes it easier, especially if you are managing a whole bunch of database servers in your enterprise. Imagine adding hundreds up to thousands of database instances, this is a much more efficient way of adding and monitoring those database instances with the help of dbWatch Control Center.
You can now easily add all database instances that you need to monitor without the hassle of adding each one of them manually by using dbWatch Bulk Install. Database monitoring has never been this easy!
We are now focusing on dbWatch Control Center Autodiscover, on the left side, choose the Autodiscover tab.
In this window, you can see that you have the register new scan box, select the dbwatch Control Center server you want to perform the scan with,
Range option – will let you specify the network range using the standard CIDR notation – Input the network range that you would like to look for existing database instances.
Select the interval. Manual means you can start the scan manually whenever you want. You can also specify that the scan should be performed once a day, once a week or once a month.
After specifying the details, click add to register the scan.
After that, a new box will appear registering the scan, Click Start to continue with the scan.
As you can see the scan has started and it found an estimate of 43 database instances already.
Let us stop the scan in the meantime. At the left, you can see the available instances.
Let us try adding an instance into our dbWatch Control Center dashboard from the results of this auto-discover scan.
Right-click the database server icon and click add instance
Another window will appear automatically it will show the host, port/instance name, instance type. You will just need to input the authentication type along with the credentials for this instance. Click Next
Select the database group, license, create a local schema wherein it will create dbWatch packages to retrieve performance statistics and specify your login authentication for this dbWatch schema. Choose the following monitoring jobs you wish to have in this SQLServer instance. Click Next.
Define the module authentication. In here, we will just set to use the existing ‘sa’ credentials for every dbWatch Control Center module like the management, sql worksheet and database reporting module. Click Next.
We are now ready to add the instance in our dbWatch Control Center dashboard; specify the display name. In here, I named it as “P001-SQL2016” and then click Install.
The database instance was successfully added to the dbWatch Control Center dashboard.
In the dashboard we could see that the SQLServer database instance has been added to the dbWatch Control Center dashboard.
With the following demonstration shown here, DBAs can now track all the available instances within the specified network range which makes it easy for them to track all their database servers.
Also, it makes it easy for them to add bulk database connections to monitor all their database instances with dbWatch Control Center.
In this blog we have discussed how to add bulk database connections in dbWatch Control Center and how to utilize the Autodiscover functionality.
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You can try dbWatch Control Center today. Use this link to download a version of dbWatch Control Center that can monitor up to 5 instances for 6 months for free: dbWatch Control Center free license
If you have any questions or you would like to know more on how dbWatch can assist you in your current enterprise database monitoring and management situation, feel free to contact me directly: chadwick@dbwatch.com or email presales@dbWatch.com
For more information, visit www.dbWatch.com or the dbWatch wiki pages
#DatabaseMonitoring #DatabaseServers #DatabaseInstances #DatabaseReporting #DBA #DatabaseReporting #DatabaseMonitoringSolution
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Other Blogs:
Customizing your dbWatch Job for SQL Servers
dbWatch 101: The dbWatch File Structure
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Chad Pabalan is a Pre-Sales Engineer for dbWatch and a DBA specializing in SQLServer high availability setups and disaster recovery planning and configurations. He is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional, a cloud enthusiast specializing in architecture and designing scalable, high available, and fault-tolerant systems on AWS Cloud.
