Monitoring Database Infrastructure and Performance with Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM), and Oracle Instance Monitoring, Plus Visio Plug-In

SCOM Does the core job of monitoring SQL Server instances very well (Health Monitoring) – but it is not going to make maintenance plans for you. 
You need to set up the database infrastructure first, so go to this article to start your SCOM journey: Here is a guide on how to setup databases and reporting for SCOM, as well as the DataWarehousing component. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2425714/en-US

Systems Center Operations Manager requires that you install an agent which is configured to run with the Console Server, and primary OLTP Management database, and furthermore, you can take advantage of the aggregates stored into a SCOM DataWarehouse (more like a Monitoring Mart, in my opinion, but hey, they have decided on that terminology…).  So far, I am using SCOM to monitor around forty SQL Server instances and a half dozen Oracle Production instances, but I would love to dig more into performance at a later date, reference below.

http://www.microsoft.com/showcase/en/us/details/18ea5032-532c-4d85-a2cd-fdf4adf3acec

For those who love visual display of network status, one can use Visio to visually add onto SCOM and monitor your complex network realtime J
Here is the download: http://visiotoolbox.com/2010/add-ins.aspx

There are issues with SCOM to watch out for:

SCOM 2007 Cluster Management Pack may cause high CPU usage on clusters with a large number of resources

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969597/en-US  

Caveat: SCOM 2007 R2 does not support SQL 2008 R2 platform yet nor mirroring unless you want to manually change the failover partner each time.

There is also a SCOM Mirroring Management Pack, which I shall implement as soon as our mirrored instances are behaving :)

Oracle Instances can be Monitored also, and this has been a great help for our cross-platform infrastructure.

Whatever the product you chose, I recommend having several tools ‘watching’ your infrastructure for you.  Quest’s Spotlight, SQLMonitor and SCOM make a good combination for us.

Please view SQL Server MVP Bob Duffy's (we met last week!) great SQLbits talk on using SCOM for SQL Server Performance Monitoring, which I still have not had the time to do a deep dive into:

http://www.sqlbits.com/Agenda/event6/Performance_Management_for_SQL_Server_with_SCOM_2007/default.aspx