5. Setting Up the Data Collector
To begin using the data collector, you need to first establish security, a login,
that will be used on all your servers for collecting data. You can
approach this in two basic ways. First, you can have a single login
across all your servers that have sysadmin privileges, which allows the
login to do anything. Second, you can use the built-in data collector
roles that are stored in the msdb system database. Detailing all the
variations for setting up security for the data collector is beyond the
scope of this book. For details, refer to “Data Collector Security” in
Books Online.
Once the security is set, you’ll need to
establish a server as the host to the management data warehouse, where
the performance data gathered through the data collector will be
stored. When you have the server ready, open SQL Server Management
Studio (SSMS), and connect to the server. Scroll down the folders
available in the Object Explorer window to the Management folder. Expand this. It should look something like Figure 6, although if you haven’t configured it, you may see a small red arrow like the one visible on the Resource Governor icon.
Figure 6. The Data Collector tool inside the Management folder
Once you have navigated to the Data Collector icon, as shown in Figure 6,
you can begin to establish the management data warehouse. Right-click
the Data Collector icon, and select Configure Management Data Warehouse
from the context menu. This will open the welcome screen to the
Configure Management Data Warehouse Wizard. Click the Next button to
get past that screen, as shown in Figure 7.
Figure 7. Management Data Warehouse Wizard’s “Select configuration task” page
The default behavior is to create or upgrade a
management data warehouse, which is exactly what needs to happen. The
other option is to set up data collection on the server that you run
this on. This is how you would set up the data collector, and there
will be more on that later in this section. Click the Next button. This
will open the next page of the wizard, shown in Figure 8.
Figure 8. Management Data Warehouse Wizard’s Configure Management Data Warehouse Storage page
This process is very
simple. Either you select an existing database to act as the management
data warehouse, or you click the New button to create one when the
standard Create Database window opens. Which you do depends on your
system. We strongly advise against placing the data collected for the
management data warehouse into one of your online transactional
systems. You could place it into an existing reporting or management
system. If you choose to select a new database, another window, called
Map Logins and Users, will open for setting up security. Adjust this as
needed for the security within your system and finish the wizard.
That’s the entire process. Behind the scenes, more occurred than you
can immediately see. Inside the database you selected or created,
several tables were created that are used by the process to manage the
collection and store the data. Stored procedures, views, user-defined
functions, and other objects were also added to the database. All these
objects are used to gather and present the data as it comes in from the
various servers where you’ve enabled the data collector.
To configure the servers that will send their
information to the management data warehouse, connect to those servers
through SSMS. Navigate to the Management folder so that you can see the
data collector, just like in Figure 6.
Right-click and select Configure Management Data Warehouse from the
context menu. This will again open the wizard’s welcome screen. Click
Next. This will open the Select Configuration Task page like in Figure 7.
Click the radio button “Set up data collection,” and click Next. This
will open the Configure Management Data Warehouse Storage page, shown
in Figure 9.
Figure 9. Configure Management Data Warehouse Storage page
From the server
where you want to collect data, you must define the server where the
management data warehouse is stored. Select the server by clicking the
ellipsis button, which will enable the “Database name” drop-down. Make
sure you select the database that you created previously. Finally, you
need to define a directory for data to be cached while it waits for the
process to pick it up for storage. Choose an appropriate location on
your system. The default is to place it on the system drive (usually C:\).
Depending on your environment, this is probably a poor choice. Instead,
a storage collection that you can manage that won’t affect other
processes is a more appropriate location. The data collector is now
configured and running.
