Sign upSign InSign upSign InHarinderjit SinghFollowITNEXT--ListenShareIn one of my older posts, I discussed how we can use Dynatrace to monitor kubernetes. Many clients running Sql Server on GCP CloudSQL have a very common requirement about monitoring their business critical application databases reliably. Dynatrace is a commonly favored observability tool for cloud native and on-premise workloads. Let's see how we can leverage Dynatrace to monitor CloudSQL instances (SQL Server).There are two main ways to do thatI am just discussing SQL Server in this post, but you can try using the PostgreSQL or MySql extensions if you are using the CloudSQL PostgresSQL or CloudSQL MySql.Dynatrace GCP integration leverages data collected from the Google Operation API to constantly monitor health and performance of Google Cloud Platform Services. While combining all relevant data into dashboards, it also enables alerting and event tracking.www.dynatrace.comDynatrace GCP metric and log integration by default provides observability metrics for many resources in the related GCP project.www.dynatrace.comThere is no extra steps to enable CloudSQL extension. Here is how the Google cloud SQL dashboard looks like. You can see there are 3 instances. 2 primary Instances and one replica Instance. It has useful information/metrics about the Instances, databases, and the infrastructure hosting these instances.Major benefit I observe is the automatic discovery of the new CloudSQL instances.This is OK but not good enough because if you compare the metrics gathered by CloudSQL extension versus the metrics gathered by MS SQL Server Extension, you would see CloudSQL extension doesn’t include many useful metrics.So Next, We will look into how to setup and configure Microsoft SQL Server extension.We are just discussing SQL Server in this post, but you can try using the PostgreSQL or MySql extensions if you are using the CloudSQL PostgresSQL or CloudSQL MySql to use the missing metrics in CloudSQL extension.We can monitor a Microsoft SQL Server instance remotely using the ActiveGate extension as it gives much more data insights about the CloudSQL Instances and the databases as well. This extension works for SQL Server Instances whether it is hosted on-premise or or on Public Cloud Provider. It supports both PaaS and IaaS installations for SQL Server. This covers many more metrics which the DBAs are interested in and are not not part of the CloudSQL Extension.www.dynatrace.comWhy can’t we use the same ActiveGate that we use to monitor kubernetes?Because the main modules used for MS SQL Server extensions are OTLP Ingest and HTTP Metric Ingest and OTLP is not supported in containerized ActiveGate deployments. https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/setup-and-configuration/dynatrace-activegate/capabilities#functional_tblTo install the extensionThe following steps describe how to configure a monitoring configuration endpoint.Endpoints are automatically distributed between ActiveGates within a certain chosen group. This allows for High Availability (HA) and load balancing between several ActiveGate instances.You can also enable SSL to make the data source verify the server certificate and use SSL encryption instead of native encryption.Specify endpoint name and Select Activate.If your organization uses SQL Auth Proxy for Database connections, you will need to install Auth Proxy on the VM where the ActiveGate is installed and then use the host equals “localhost” and port will be the proxy port for that instanceAfter being activated, the newly created endpoint acquires Pending status, followed by Error status, which indicates that the tenant has not yet found an ActiveGate to run the endpoint on.Status Ok indicates that the configuration has passed a Fastcheck stage, verifying that it has a connection to the database and collects metrics.You will see much more useful information in addition to what CloudSQL Extension offers.Here are few more Snapshots of the SQL Server Instance metricsYou can review the logins and user connections as well. You can also see the blocking sessions and processes.You can navigate to the databases associated with the SQL Server Instance and review the metrics specifically related to that database.Some drawbacks Of SQL server extensionWhat if you want to create an alert using a custom query against the SQL Server database?You can use Custom Query extension (not covered in this post) for that purpose.In nutshell, none of the above Is a perfect solution but a hybrid solution using all these extensions can be used to monitor the CloudSQL instances and databases comprehensively.Please read my other articles as well and share your feedback. If you like the content shared please like, comment, and subscribe for new articles.----ITNEXTExperienced Database Engineer learning and practicing Cloud (Azure and GCP) and Devops/SRE components. Writes about significant learnings and experiences.HelpStatusWritersBlogCareersPrivacyTermsAboutText to speechTeams