Microsoft Atlanta – Review of a new Microsoft product to monitor SQL Server Environment based on cloud

Microsoft recently launched a new monitoring tool for SQL Server environment code named as “Atlanta”. As per Microsoft’s own publication, Atlanta s a secure cloud service that proactively monitors your Microsoft SQL Server deployments. It helps you avoid configuration problems, reduce downtime, improve performance, and resolve issues faster.

If you are interested to try it for free, you can register at https://www.microsoftatlanta.com/ and get started from there.

However after reviewing the technical details, personally I do not feel this tool will be a great hit for commercial market. This is because of below reasons:

1. As of now Atlanta is not a real time monitoring system. Hence existing real-time monitoring systems (which typically have analysis part also) can not be replaced by it for critical environment.
   
   
2. Atlanta supports only SQL 2008 or later on Win 2008 or later. This means customers have to use some other tool to monitor older servers. This particular point can be a show-stopper for investing money on this product. Almost every standard monitoring and analysis tool available today support older versions of SQL Servers/OS.
   
   
3. As Atlanta sends data to cloud for analysis, there will be a very serious privacy concern which will be another show-stopper for many organizations. On this concern, I read a comment of Paul (Atlanta’s program manager) at http://www.brentozar.com/archive/2010/11/microsoft-atlanta-cloudbased-sql-server-monitoring/ informing Atlanta collects only configuration information (e.g. sys.configurations, sys.databases, driver versions, some registry keys) and send all data in a plain XML (so that everyone can review every information what Atlanta is sending to MS cloud). However I think believe privacy will be a serious concern unless Microsoft legally confirms exactly what data it is collecting and for why.

As of now Atlanta’s privacy statement (as per below picture) clearly tells it will collect “Performance Data” which legally can be anything from server configuration to text of a query including sensitive information like SSN.

However I believe all of these concerns will be addressed before this tool goes in business and I wish a great success to “Team Atlanta” on this venture.