After some recent discussions with colleagues Tom LaRock (b|t) and Kendall VanDyke (b|t) about information around AlwaysOn availability groups and how it’s lacking in the GUI, I thought I would do some community service and start documenting the DMVs a little further than books online. One thing you will notice in this series is that the naming is not always consistent—some DMVs will reflect the original HADRON name that Microsoft was using for Availability Groups.
So let’s get into the DMVs. Starting with sys.availability_databases_cluster:
This DMV contains one record for each Availability Group and database hosted on a given Windows cluster—it should look the same on each member of your availability group. The GUIDs represent the availability group’s unique ID, and then the unique ID of the database within the group, and the name of the database. Here’s a look at a SharePoint AG.
This data isn’t too interesting—as we get further into this blog series, I’ll show how we can tie these DMVs together to get relevant data.