Azure Monitor SQL insights (Preview)
Comprehensive and reliable monitoring is a top priority for all SQL customers.
The Azure SQL and Azure Monitor teams are proud to announce the preview of Azure Monitor SQL insights: a new, Azure-native monitoring experience for almost any SQL deployment in Azure.
To learn more about SQL Insights, and how to onboard see the documentation at docs.microsoft.com.
What is SQL insights?
SQL insights is a remote, agent-based monitoring solution. It is developed jointly by the Azure SQL and Azure Monitor teams using an open-source agent called Telegraf. SQL insights delivers a new and more powerful monitoring experience for almost any SQL deployment in Azure.
How is SQL insights different from other offerings?
SQL insights puts the controls in the hands of our customers. It is a platform for collecting, streaming, storing, visualizing, and analyzing almost any SQL telemetry. The SQL insights platform is fully integrated with all the current Azure Monitor offerings, providing customers access to out-of-the-box visualizations, alerting, automation, and analysis.
Capabilities include:
- Configure data collection frequency
- Choose exactly which data to collect
- Control the retention policy for the data
- Visualize data using Azure Monitor Workbooks
- Create separate Data Collection Rules for every environment
- Integrate with open-source monitoring solutions (Telegraf)
- Surface over two hundred new metrics
- Monitor almost any SQL deployment in Azure: Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance and SQL Server on Azure VM
Supported Deployment Options
SQL insights supports the following versions of SQL Server:
- SQL Server 2012 and newer
SQL insights supports SQL Server running in the following environments:
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure SQL Managed Instance
- Azure SQL VMs
- Azure VMs
SQL insights does not support or has limited support for the following:
- Azure SQL Serverless Deployments: Serverless deployments are fully supported for SQL insights functionality. However, the remote agent will prevent any database deployed with the serverless compute tier from pausing. This could lead to increased compute costs for customers.
- SQL Server running on virtual machines or on non-Hypervised infrastructure outside of Azure is currently not supported.
- Azure SQL Database Elastic Pools: No support during the preview.
- Azure SQL Database in the following service tiers: Free, Basic, S0 and S1.
- Readable Secondaries: Currently only deployment types with a single readable secondary endpoint (Business Critical or Azure SQL Database Hyperscale) will be supported.
- Azure Active Directory: Currently, we only support SQL authentication. We plan to support Azure Active Directory authentication in an upcoming release. For SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, there is currently no support for authenticating via Active Directory on a bespoke domain controller.
Disclaimer
Please note that the products and options presented in this article are subject to change. This article reflects the Azure Monitor SQL insights options available in preview in March 2021.
