Monitoring SQL Server Agent

Jobs with SCOM

Keeping Tabs on Maintenance Jobs

Introduction
In an environment where you work, there is a high degree of probably that you use Microsoft SQL
Server of some version of edition to provide a database to an application. In the same environment,
theres a good chance, if you are a Microsoft shop that you are using System Center Operations
Manager (SCOM) to monitor your environments.
All good database administrators (DBAs) create jobs, plans and tasks to keep their SQL servers in tip
top shape but a lot of the time, insight as to the status of these jobs is left either unturned like an
age old stone or is done by configuring SQL Database Mail on your SQL servers so that email alerts
are generated which means you have additional configuration being done on every server to
configure this and its yet another thing to manage.
In this guide, I am going to walk you through configuring a System Center Operations Manager 2012
R2 environment to extend the monitoring of your SQL Servers to include the health state of your SQL
Server Agent Jobs, allowing you to keep an eye on not just the SQL Server platform but also on the
jobs that run to make the platform healthy.
This guide as are all my publications, dedicated to my wife Nicky and my three daughters; Madison,
Jessica and Layla who are subjected to living with me and technology and not always in that order.

Authors
Richard J Green works as a Consultant for Fordway Solutions Limited, dealing in all things Microsoft
whilst specializing in delivering System Center solutions helping customers leverage their investment
in IT through Microsoft management technologies. Richard works extensively with Windows Azure.
He has an unhealthy obsession with the colour pink hence the colour choice of this book.
You can follow Richard on Twitter @richardjgreen or read his blog at focusing on Microsoft products
and technologies along with other digital ramblings at http://richardjgreen.net.

Copyright
This book is copyright of Richard J Green and co-authors. No unauthorised copying of material in this
book shall be performed without the prior written consent of Richard Green or one of the coauthors.
2014

Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 2
Authors.................................................................................................................................................... 2
Copyright ................................................................................................................................................. 2
Prerequisites for Configuration............................................................................................................... 4
SQL Server and SQL Server Agent ....................................................................................................... 4
SQL Server Agent Jobs......................................................................................................................... 4
System Center Operations Manager................................................................................................... 4
Configuring SQL Agent Job Monitoring................................................................................................... 5
Create a SQL Server Agent Targeting Group ....................................................................................... 5
Enable the Agent Job Object Discovery .............................................................................................. 6
Create a SQL Server Agent Job Targeting Group ................................................................................ 8
Enable Alerting for Failed SQL Server Agent Jobs ............................................................................. 10
Extra Credit Tasks .................................................................................................................................. 11
Closing Credits....................................................................................................................................... 11

Monitoring SQL Server Agent Jobs with SCOM

Prerequisites for Configuration

In order to be able to complete the steps in this guide, you need to have some things in place in your
environment, nothing that you shouldnt already have though mind you.

SQL Server and SQL Server Agent

It goes without saying that to monitor SQL Server Agent Jobs, the scope of this guide, you will need
to have a SQL Server that has a running SQL Server Agent. This can be either a standalone SQL
Server, a SQL Server Failover Cluster or a SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group.
The SQL Server Agent should be configured with a service type of Automatic for Standalone and
AlwaysOn Availability Group servers or to Manual and controlled by the Cluster Service for Failover
Cluster instances of SQL Server.
In this guide, I am working with SQL Server 2012 but there is no rule for this. You can deploy this
configuration with any version or edition of SQL Server and adjust the steps in the guide accordingly.

SQL Server Agent Jobs

As the scope of this guide is configuring SQL Server Agent Jobs, it is fairly obvious that we need to
have some jobs to monitor. The scope of this guide is not to tell you how to create SQL Server Agent
Jobs or what jobs you should have but I have a blog post exploring the Ola Hallengren SQL
Maintenance Solution at http://richardjgreen.net/sql-server-maintenance-solution/ if you want
more information.

System Center Operations Manager

In this guide, I am working with System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2 which is the latest
release, ignoring the System Center vNext Technical Preview recently made available.
There is no limitation for this to only work with SCOM 2012 R2 and it would be entirely possible to
do this with older versions of SCOM. The only limiting factor with SCOM is Management Packs. In
order to be able to follow this guide, you need to have the SQL Server Management Packs for the
appropriate versions of SQL Server installed.
The System Center Management Pack for SQL Server supporting SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2008 R2 and
2012 can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=10631.
The System Center Management Pack for SQL Server 2014 can be downloaded from
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42573.

Configuring SQL Agent Job Monitoring

Configuring SQL Agent Job Monitoring

With all of our prerequisite talk out of the way, we can now get to the real topic, how to configure
this monitoring.
By default, the SQL Server Management Pack for SCOM monitors SQL Server health but with respect
to the SQL Server Agent, it only monitors the health of the Agent service and not what runs inside
that agent.

Create a SQL Server Agent Targeting Group

To get started, you need to make a choice: do you want to monitor the SQL Server Agent for a
selection of your servers or for all of them?
I made the choice that I want to only target a sub-set of servers for this monitoring so the first step is
to create a group for these servers. In SCOM, we create a group from the Groups node of the
Authoring pane in the Operations Console.

As you will see from the screenshot of the group creation, the object that needs to be added is the
SQLAgent$SERVER object, where SERVER is the SQL Server server name.
If you wanted to include all SQL Servers in your environment, you could create the appropriate
Dynamic Members statement or you could ignore this step and apply the following step to All
Objects of a Class instead of to the Group.

Monitoring SQL Server Agent Jobs with SCOM

Enable the Agent Job Object Discovery

With our group created, we now need to turn our attention to actually discovering the Agent Jobs
and that is as the name suggests, done by an Object Discovery.
In the Operations Console, on the Authoring pane, open the Object Discoveries node and change
the scope of the Management Packs to be limited to SQL Server 2012 Agent Job. You will need to
change the radio button at the bottom of the scope dialog to View All Targets whilst doing this as
the Agent is not defined as a common Management Pack.

You should then see the Object Discovery Discover SQL Server 2012 Agent Jobs job which is disabled
by default hence why we dont get the statuses for our SQL Server Agent Jobs out of the box.
Right-click this Object Discovery and select Overrides > Override the Object Discovery > For a Group
and from the group picker, select the group we created previously in the SQL Server and SQL Server
Agent step.

Configuring SQL Agent Job Monitoring

In the Override Properties as you can see from the screenshot above, we want to override the
status of this Object Discovery from Disabled to Enabled. Select the Override checkbox for the
Parameter Name Enabled and set the Override Value to True. Once you have done this, select OK to
apply the change.
The next part depends on your level of patience. If you are happy to wait, then leave everything
along and come back the following day as that is how long it will take the Microsoft Monitoring
Agent on the SQL Server hosts to pick up the change to the Object Discovery and run it because of
the Interval on the discovery.
If like me, you dont want to wait for that, simply restart the Microsoft Monitoring Agent service on
your SQL Servers and the changes will be pulled in immediately and the Object Discovery forced to
run at the agent restart.
We can check that our SQL Server Agent Jobs have been discovered by SCOM using the Monitoring
view. Click the Monitoring pane in the Operations Console and drill down to Microsoft SQL Server >
SQL Server Database Engines > SQL Server 2005/2008/2012 > SQL Agent and open the SQL Agent
Job State state view.

As you can see from this screenshot, the two servers that I included in the group have performed the
discovery of the SQL Server Agent Jobs and their status has been reported into SCOM as Healthy.
In the screenshot, there are three jobs per server, dbcc_checkdb_weekly and
defragment_indexes_weekly which are user created SQL Server Agent Jobs and
syspolicy_purge_history which is a system job.
Because syspolicy_purge_history is a system job thats only purpose is to clear down the history of
SQL Server Agent Jobs history I am not actually interested in monitoring this. Furthermore, we
probably dont want to monitor SQL Server Agent Jobs which individual administrators have chosen
to create to aid their work; we only want to monitor the company mandated jobs used for
maintaining our servers.

Monitoring SQL Server Agent Jobs with SCOM

Create a SQL Server Agent Job Targeting Group

So far, we are collecting the status of the Jobs from the SQL Server Agents into SCOM. The status for
these jobs is based on the Last Run Status monitor however right now, we are only seeing the status
and there will not be any alerting.
To get the alerting that we desire, we need to prepare another group to allow us to scope the user
created jobs and to then allow those jobs to generate alerts.

As shown in the screenshot above, I have started the process of creating a group however this time,
the group is based on Dynamic Membership. By using Dynamic Membership, we can define here in
the group the Job Names that we want to monitor and based on the membership of our first group,
these will automatically be targeted and will be automatically applied to all our SQL Servers.
In this Dynamic Group, I have chosen to include Or expression groups for each of the SQL Server
Agent Job versions so that should somebody later add a SQL Server to our Agent Job monitoring
group that is running a different version of SQL Server that it will still work. This is covered briefly in
the Extra Credit Tasks task at the end of this guide but not a requirement.
Once we have created our new group, we can use the View Group Members menu option in the
Groups node of the Authoring pane in the Operations Console to check that we have correctly
targeted our Classes and that everything has been detected properly.

Configuring SQL Agent Job Monitoring

As you can see from the image above, the user created SQL Server Agent Jobs that we designated to
be part of this Dynamic Group have been correctly detected confirming both that our Class Targeting
has been set correctly and that our expression to match the Job Name is working also.

Monitoring SQL Server Agent Jobs with SCOM

Enable Alerting for Failed SQL Server Agent Jobs

So far, weve achieved a lot by targeting our SQL Servers and getting monitoring insight into the
status of our SQL Server Agent Jobs but to get the full story, we now want to generate alerts for any
failures and because we are kind SCOM Administrators, we want our alerts to automatically resolve
which means we are using a Monitor for the SCOM educated amongst you.
On the Authoring pane of the Operations Console, select the Monitor node. In the Monitor node,
scope the Management Packs to SQL Server 2012 Agent Jobs which may already be the case from
our previous scoping efforts.
Right-click the Last Run Status Monitor and select Overrides > Override the Monitor > For a Group
and select the group that we created in the last step Create a SQL Server Agent Job Targeting Group.

At the Override Properties dialog as shown above in the screenshot, override the Auto-Resolve Alert
and Generate Alert Parameter Names and change both of their Override Values to True.
Once youve made these changes, select OK to apply the override.
You now have a solution in place to bring visibly to the status of your SQL Server Agent Jobs into
SCOM and you have alert generation for failures.

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Extra Credit Tasks

Extra Credit Tasks

Now that you are finished, here are some extra credit tasks you can consider to make this even
better:

Repeat the steps in this guide for other versions of SQL Server such as SQL Server 2014 to
future-proof your efforts if someone in your environment decides to be cutting-edge and
deploys a SQL Server 2014 instance.
Configure a Notification Channel and Subscriber for the SQL Server Agent Jobs alerts and
have the alerts sent to your monitoring team or your SQL DBA team, whichever is relevant in
your environment.
Use Dynamic Membership on the first group we created in the Create a SQL Server Agent
Targeting Group step so automatically include all of your SQL Servers but just make that you
are happy that the health state of all of your SQL Servers is in a good place before you do
otherwise the people receiving your alerts might be a bit unhappy with you.

Closing Credits
I hope youve enjoyed this guide and found it helpful and please feel free to reach out to me via my
blog at http://richardjgreen.net or via Twitter at @richardjgreen if you want more information about
this guide or have any suggestions for how it could be made even better.

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