After having a period of logshipping failures going unnoticed (due to a stopped SQL Agent on the secondary server) I’m looking at configuring some monitoring.
Having seen the ability to specify a “Monitor Server instance” on the SQL Server 2008 log shipping setup and the relavant MSDN docs (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb510705.aspx), I’m keen to setup a “Monitor Server”. However having trawled MSDN and google I actually can’t find any information on how to configure a Monitor Server.
At this point I don’t even know what a monitor server is (i.e. is it just another SQL Server instance?)! Also, is this separate from the monitoring modules in SQL Server Management Studio?
Any guidance or pointers to documentation would be much appreciated.
The log shipping monitor is a third server that watches the primary and standby servers and keeps a log of the backups, copies and restores so you can find out what’s going on. The benefit of using a monitor is that you still know your status even if one or both of the participating servers goes down. For instance, if the primary server goes down you know how much data you will lose if you fail over to the standby server.
I’m pretty sure you can add a monitor to your existing log shipping setup. This article should help you learn more:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190640.aspx