InstantForum.NET v2.9.0SQLServerCentralhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/notifications@sqlservercentral.comSun, 19 May 2013 15:51:22 GMT20http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic445732-1185-1.aspxMerrill,Yes, monitoring software like Idera DM and Quest Spotlight does work. I use them all day long. It is the best black-box recorder you can have when CIO wants to know why database had a problem last week (month) and evidence report.However I wrote a lot of stuff myself, because A) the tool may not provide or provided a different view. Imagine how many performance counters you can have recorded and shown. The tool may not have all. Any DBA manual tasks, I wrote them into automated scripts. When I come to work, I only need to glance review everything. B) I wrote index defrag which savs my company $1200 per instance per year. That is $80,000 saving. I wrote database refresh script so I can plug in parameters and run a refresh at a few clicks. There are things money cannot buy.When I have some doubts about my databases, I pull out some scripts from my repository (most of them in SP form), a few clicks I have complete info about my databases' current status.Jasonhttp://usa.redirectme.netWed, 16 Nov 2011 19:54:08 GMTjswong05http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic445732-1185-1.aspxThis series is great, but isn't the phrase "months of laborious work" indicative of the notion it might be more effective to buy a monitoring tool than to write one? It might be possible to get a lot more functionality while spending your time on work directly benefiting whatever your core business is.Tue, 22 Jan 2008 11:41:22 GMTMerrill Aldrichhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic445732-1185-1.aspxInteresting articleI have RedGate Toolbelt, but sucks that SQL Backup is PER SERVER license so I don't have it installed on any server instance yet to try this techniqueTue, 22 Jan 2008 10:10:15 GMTJerry Hunghttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic445732-1185-1.aspxComments posted to this topic are about the item [B]<A HREF="/articles/Backup/61968/">Reporting on Activity across Multiple Servers using SQL Backup and SQL Multi Script</A>[/B]Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:36:11 GMTrodneylandrum