Management Data Warehouse in SQL Server 2008 stops working after you rename your server

I will write this post in english, because I think this might be a common error, and from what I can see Microsoft does not have any info on this, nor does Google…

So here is the situation: You install your SQL Server Instance (In my case it was a clustered instance). Then all of the sudden you realize that the servername has to be changed. Microsoft describes the simple steps to do this in a clustered instance here.

But if you have Management Data Warehouse enabled with the standard data collectors running, you will run in to problems with their respective jobs not running.

They will generate errors like this: The step did not generate any output.  Process Exit Code 1.  The step failed. The following jobs are affected: collection_set_1_noncached_collect_and_upload ,Step: 3. collection_set_2_upload Step: 2 collection_set_3_upload Step: 2 I found that the root cause for this lies in msdb. In the table msdb.dbo.syscollector_config_store.

Run the following code to identify the problem: SELECT parameter_name, parameter_value FROM msdb.dbo.syscollector_config_store; There is a parameter_name called MDWInstance that is still displaying the old servername.Change that to the new servername using this code: UPDATE msdb.dbo.syscollector_config_store set parameter_value ='newservername' where parameter_name = 'MDWInstance'

Then stop and start datacollection, and it should be working again! More info on how to control your datacollection can be found here at MSDN