InstantForum.NET v2.9.0SQLServerCentralhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/notifications@sqlservercentral.comWed, 22 May 2013 14:37:49 GMT20http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxI found the article to be very interesting as well but I have a similar situation where I have several servers. I would like the names of some 3rd party vendors to automate this process.Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:53:03 GMTmsilverhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxOut of my experience I have couple of more things that can be added to monitoring checklist.BackupsIt is very important to check integrity of the backup files. Once in a while try to restore .bak files on some dummy database just to confirm the backed up databases are good enough to restore in times emergenciesDisk SpaceKeep track on size of database and how fast is it growing. These records can be used for future analysis of capacity planningTue, 31 Aug 2010 01:45:10 GMTCOOL_ICEhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxOut of my experience I have couple of more things that can be added to monitoring checklist.BackupsIt is very important to check integrity of the backup files. Once in a while try to restore .bak files on some dummy database just to confirm the backed up databases are good enough to restore in times emergenciesDisk SpaceKeep track on size of database and how fast is it growing. These records can be used for future analysis of capacity planningTue, 31 Aug 2010 01:27:18 GMTCOOL_ICEhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxthxthis is what i have so far from what you pointed me to[quote]select @@servername, a.database_id as Database_ID ,a.name as Database_Name, b.name as FileName, substring(b.physical_name, 1,1) as Drive_Letter, b.physical_name as Path, b.size as File_Size, b.max_size, b.growth, a.create_date,a.recovery_model_desc, a.page_verify_option_descfrom sys.databases ainner join sys.master_files bon a.database_id = b.database_id[/quote]my perfmon query is [quote]declare @dayofthemonth int;declare @month int;declare @hour int;declare @minute int;set @dayofthemonth = (select DATEPART(day, getdate()));set @month = (select DATEPART(month, getdate()));set @hour = (select DATEPART(hour, getdate()));set @minute = (select DATEPART(minute, getdate()));with free_hd_space_cteas(select a.counterid, substring(a.machinename,3,20) as machinename, a.objectname, a.countername, a.instancename, convert(int, b.countervalue) as CounterValue, max(convert(datetime, substring(b.counterdatetime,1, 16))) as TimeReadfrom counterdetails a inner join counterdata bon a.counterid = b.counteridwhere b.counterid in (select CounterIDfrom counterdetails where objectname = 'logicaldisk'and countername in ('Free Megabytes')and instancename != '_Total')and convert(datetime, substring(b.counterdatetime,1, 16)) > getdate() -1 group by a.machinename, a.instancename, a.counterid, a.objectname, a.countername,b.countervalue, b.counterdatetime--order by a.machinename, a.instancename, a.counterid)select distinct MachineName, ObjectName, CounterName, InstanceName, Countervalue, TimeReadfrom free_hd_space_cte where datepart(day, timeread) = @dayofthemonthand datepart(month, timeread) = @monthand datepart(hour, timeread) = @hourand datepart(minute, timeread) between 0 and 9and countervalue < 30--and (select countername from free_hd_space_cte where countervalue < 30 and countername = '% Free Space')group by MachineName, ObjectName, CounterName, InstanceName, CounterValue, timeread --having datepart(minute, timeread) between 0 and 9order by machinename, countername, countervalue asc, instancename[/quote]plan is to dump the result of the first querry into a database every day and then change the second to join on that table to return more data. since a lot of our database files stay big with a lot of white space in them i don't want to check them when a drive is low on space. i want a single report with free space on each drive, the database files on there and the free space in each onenext is to find where SQL stores the data to see how much free space is in each filefound it, going to look in sp_spaceused and take the code from there to use for this reportMon, 30 Aug 2010 13:04:11 GMTalen teplitskyhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxHere is some queries extracted from an Access program to collect stats on SQL data bases FOR SQL 7:SQL = "SELECT DB.name AS DBname, DB.crdate as DBCrDate, DB.Status as Status,DB.Status2 as Status2,DB.dbid," & _ "AF.[size] AS DBsize,ISNULL(SUSER_SNAME(DB.sid), '') AS Owner_FullNetworkID " & _ "FROM master.dbo.sysaltfiles AF RIGHT OUTER JOIN master.dbo.sysdatabases DB ON AF.dbid = DB.dbid " & _ "WHERE AF.groupid = 1"FOR SQL 2000: SQL = "SELECT DB.name AS DBname, DB.crdate as DBCrDate, DB.Status as Status,DB.Status as Status2,DB.dbid," & _ "AF.[size] AS DBsize,ISNULL(SUSER_SNAME(DB.sid), '') AS Owner_FullNetworkID " & _ "FROM master.dbo.sysaltfiles AF RIGHT OUTER JOIN master.dbo.sysdatabases DB ON AF.dbid = DB.dbid " & _ "WHERE AF.groupid = 1"For SQL 2005 SQL = "SELECT DB.name AS DBname, DB.status as Status, DB.status2 as Status2, DB.crdate AS DBCrDate,DB.dbid," & _ "AF.size AS DBsize,ISNULL(SUSER_SNAME(DB.sid), '') AS Owner_FullNetworkID " & _ "FROM msdb.sys.sysdatabases AS DB " & _ " LEFT OUTER JOIN " & _ " (SELECT * FROM msdb.sys.sysaltfiles WHERE groupid=1) AS AF " & _ " ON DB.dbid = AF.dbid " For SQL 2008: SQL = "SELECT DB.name AS DBname, DB.status as Status, DB.status2 as Status2, DB.crdate AS DBCrDate,DB.dbid," & _ "AF.size AS DBsize,ISNULL(SUSER_SNAME(DB.sid), '') AS Owner_FullNetworkID " & _ "FROM msdb.sys.sysdatabases AS DB " & _ " LEFT OUTER JOIN " & _ " (SELECT * FROM msdb.sys.sysaltfiles WHERE groupid=1) AS AF " & _ " ON DB.dbid = AF.dbid "Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:53:43 GMTchuck.beachhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxlooking on writing a report on #1, disk spacecan someone point me to some sample code to do the following. grab the database info on a server. the size of the db, the free space, all db files and free space on them. SSMS has reports for it, but i was looking for the code to write my own consolidated version for all our servers and databasesMon, 30 Aug 2010 11:45:56 GMTalen teplitskyhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxThank you for taking time to read my article. I appreciate the insight of each poster. I posted my initial comments on 4/14/2008. However, let me reiterate that I wrote this article to challenge those who do not yet have a checklist to develop one. To the shops that do have a checklist, I desired to offer my ideas to improve their shops even more. I also appreciate your comments, so that I may improve my process. Thanks,Bill Richards, MCSE, MCDBASenior Database AnalystMon, 30 Aug 2010 06:34:37 GMTBill Richards-377350http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxHi,I think most of the DBAs are already having this kind of everyday checklist. The point is, we need the automation of it. Its literaly annoying to do these tasks manually on more than 50 servers everyday. So if you have some idea about automating the same, that will be great :-)Anyways, nice article ;-)Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:19:56 GMTDivine Flamehttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxOf all the morning checkings most stress full is "Space Checking"we are monitoring over 50 production server..so space checking of each server is tough..carrying it in a week .. dividing in set to be carried in a day..is a good idea. //it will give u a stats to analyse and estimate the risk,there should be some automation for space checking.Sun, 29 Aug 2010 06:01:39 GMTamarGhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxGreat article and something i need to put in place in my environment. We are using Idera SQL Safe to perform the backups so I know at a moments notice if backups or trans logs backups fail. I do need to get a monitoring tool for SQL diags. Anyone have any recommendations? Idera's is good but wondering if there are any other alternatives out there. That would make my checklist even easier with a good monitoring toolFri, 27 Aug 2010 14:54:50 GMTSteve Vassallohttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspx[quote][b]arturo_caceres (8/27/2010)[/b][hr]Hola Todos,Creo que ademas de verificar lo basico, tambien se debe verificar como los usuarios estan accesando la Base de Datos, 2) se debe tener en cuenta el crecimiento de los datafiles, y separar las tablas bigs enormes con miles de rows en datafiles, analizando datos y preparando cambios para el afinamiento.SaludosArturo Caceres S.DBA Nicaragua[/quote]i've wanted to do that for a while but it seems that storage is the most expensive part of a server and it's hard to buy enough hard drives to do it the right way.Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:46:20 GMTalen teplitskyhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxgreat article. I'm a big fan myself of checklists. I.T. is just too complex to manage without such a discipline.The main exception I have is paper (though always a great place to start).I'd rather have the automation check these things out then send the DBA a report. Here is an example:[img]http://www.rockfordchess.org/sc/Daily_SQL_Audit.JPG[/img]Fri, 27 Aug 2010 08:43:15 GMTchuck.beachhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxHola Todos,Creo que ademas de verificar lo basico, tambien se debe verificar como los usuarios estan accesando la Base de Datos, 2) se debe tener en cuenta el crecimiento de los datafiles, y separar las tablas bigs enormes con miles de rows en datafiles, analizando datos y preparando cambios para el afinamiento.SaludosArturo Caceres S.DBA NicaraguaFri, 27 Aug 2010 08:40:09 GMTarturo_cacereshttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxi've been slowly building a monitoring system over the last few yearsaround 2 years ago due to SOX we had a requirement to save all security logs from domain controllers and some servers. i set up a system to dump them into a database and use SSRS to present the data to people. the first year was mostly learning and this year i wrote some more reports and transferred them to a new scale out SSRS deployment we did. this also enabled the emailing of data to people. then i added to the system by exporting application logs as well.every morning i get an email from SSRS with any application log errors from all our SQL servers in the last week. i don't check it every day which is why the report goes a week back.another report has security log events from SQL servers and there is another one for failed jobsfor security i also get a few emails about wrong passwords for admin accounts as well as any AD group changes. this past week i caught someone adding a person to one of our AD groups that we use for Windows Authentication on a server that is in SOX scope and that gives rights to change revenue data on several servers and databases. the policy is to issue a ticket that has to be approved to add anyone to that group. for backups i have a daily job to export the tables from msdb to a central database and query it. i get emails for any database that has never been backed up, no full backup in 7 days, a general report of the latest full/diff backups for all servers and databases and a few others i made up. i used to audit backups once every 6 months or so and always found databases not being backed up. sometimes it was a developer creating a database on a server they have access to and not telling anyone. other times it was a mistake when changing a script. Netbackup isn't very good in reporting the backup status of databases so i had to write my own process.for performance i've been collecting perfmon counters for 9 months now and email an hourly report. we also bought a third party tool to monitor servers that does it as well except it started emailing alerts and we had no data of our own since it was controlled by someone else. so i wrote a report to query the last few hours of permon data and send it out hourly. it used to send only anything out of the accepted range but changed it due to the above application sending out alerts. going to code another report just for alert data.i also have a report that sends hourly the amount of commands waiting to be replicated. have plans to write another one for the amount of commands at distributor waiting to be replicatedand the final report is an hourly report of all SSRS report modifications. our BI devs have access to create/modify reports and we've had a few tickets where people complained that some report didn't work. set this up so we know if anyone is modifying a report people are complaining about.all this is done using logparser and normal SQL Server features with a central SQL Server used to store the data. i wanted to use powershell but version 1 had some limitations and looking to see if i can use version 2. once in a while i get calls about buying some expensive monitoring software and there is never any value compared to what you can do yourself. some things like backup monitoring i coded from examples in the articles here and just modified them. other reports like querying log data i wrote myself and used www.ultimatewindowssecurity.com for explanations on what all the event ID's meanFri, 27 Aug 2010 06:48:48 GMTalen teplitskyhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxVery cool. Interesting how valid this article is still today. I also find it interesting all this talk about 50 hundred SQL Servers and DBA teams. In every contract that I have worked for the last 10 years, I have usually been the only one qualified as a DBA, but was expected to be spending most of my time programming. NO ONE spent any time monitoring the server(s) (usually one, very occasionally two). In fact, the only thing I would check would be to verify that the previous night's DB backup had run and that the instance had successfully restarted after the the server backup had run. Other than that the only time anyone touched the server was to create stored procedures, restore backups copies of the production databases, and to generate DB diagrams for the monthly report or after changes in the DB structure. So it is truly fascinating to hear about all these people who don't have the time to do these morning checks. It is also fascinating to hear about these people who are saying we get paid too much to be spending time doing this manually. (Really! Where do you work? I want to work there.) Around here, if all you do is DBA work without being a web developer, a GIS developer, and a desktop developer as well, your skills are not valued.I will implement this morning checklist and maybe that will proactively handle the rare issues that come up so that I can get back to development quicker.Fri, 27 Aug 2010 06:43:12 GMTejoell 66477http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxI use Quest's Spotlight and Solarwinds IP Monitor, which are displayed on 2 wall mounted wide screen TVs.In the morning I can see immediately what is going on the moment I walk in the office and all I do is check and fix whatever is red.Any items flagged as orange need to be looked into, but not urgently.As the monitoring is constant, any issues are flagged up within minutes without me having to run any repetative tasks myself.On the weekends certain critical events (like disk space etc) are sent to me automatically by text message so I can remotely log on and fix rather than waiting until Monday by which time the critical event may have become a fatal one. I also receive a text message to confirm that the issue is resolved - handy when you know some issues will clear themselves with a certain timeframe.With these two tools set up efficiently, there are no logs or emails to go through and no manual tasks leaving me to get on with the 'interesting stuff'.Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:32:22 GMTSQL Paulhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspx[quote][b]rubes (4/14/2008)[/b][hr]Nice article. I would just like to point out that for those of us that have numerous servers, automation of the checklist is critical. If you're dealing with only one server, manually checking these things does not take a lot of time. But imagine checking job failures or drive space on 50 sql servers. We get paid too much to perform these menial tasks by hand. There are many 3rd party tools out there that do this for us. It's also pretty easy to write your own scripts and sql jobs... many starter scripts could probably be found on this forum. One benefit of automating your checklist is time. The other benefit is proactive in nature. If a drive is out of space because tempdb exploded in size over night, it's better to get notified via email at 4 am. Sure, the cell phone disturbs your precious sleep, but you now have 4 hours to fix the situation before business opens at 8 am and people start screaming.Also, if there are numerous DBAs on your team, automating these checks helps greatly with standardization.[/quote]I signed in to make exactly these points. Automation, monitoring, and making use of job failure notifications, etc, is key if you have multiple sql servers, there is no way I could check 150+ servers each day.Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:09:46 GMTstobehttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspx[quote][b]rubes (4/14/2008)[/b][hr]Nice article. I would just like to point out that for those of us that have numerous servers, automation of the checklist is critical. If you're dealing with only one server, manually checking these things does not take a lot of time. But imagine checking job failures or drive space on 50 sql servers. We get paid too much to perform these menial tasks by hand. There are many 3rd party tools out there that do this for us. It's also pretty easy to write your own scripts and sql jobs... many starter scripts could probably be found on this forum. One benefit of automating your checklist is time. The other benefit is proactive in nature. If a drive is out of space because tempdb exploded in size over night, it's better to get notified via email at 4 am. Sure, the cell phone disturbs your precious sleep, but you now have 4 hours to fix the situation before business opens at 8 am and people start screaming.Also, if there are numerous DBAs on your team, automating these checks helps greatly with standardization.[/quote]Seconded.For Oracle we aggregate results of overnight operations across all databases into one email (this includes known databases where something should have happened and didn't)We then have an auto generated service call where the reactive DBA for the day lists the errors and what he/she did about them.I would like to do the same for SQL Server, but my knowledge is limited and hence we still have a very manual process on SQL Server.Fri, 27 Aug 2010 02:09:21 GMTfloppydiskhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxI was excited by the article when I saw the title, but reading through I realised that most of these checks are done. I have only just started in the dba role for the last 8 months. My first job was to set up db monitoring and morning checks.I have a system which monitors job failures, replication, indexing, db growth...etc, I get mails through out the day and each morning as a review. This email I reply to as confirmation (including any action taken) and stored in source safe.Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:44:46 GMTmark.pointonhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxHello, everybody.This is good idea to cheсk servers every morning. But if you have 50 servers, like me, you will be dead before you will finish such check out. I can give some adviсe, as head of DBA team, how you can save a lot of time and be shure that all works perfectly:1. Collect information about all IT infrastructre in your company and gover it in CMDB.2. Create alerts on SQL servers and operators to inform them.3. The message from alerts and jobs with high priority have to be sent in Service Desk system and to operators.4. Very usefull to deploy monitoring system (HP, SCOM or so on).5. Use the SMS services to inform operator about disasters in non work time.Theese steps with help you, becouse if disaster you will know about it right in the moment, if you have a problem you will information as soon, as you run your comp.My group consists from 4 mans, and only one hour we need to become shure that we do not have any problem.Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:23:23 GMTmaxibekhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxI use SQL Response to monitor all my servers in various locations around the globe.Fri, 27 Aug 2010 01:14:31 GMTliebesiechhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxCould you please be more specific about what you are not able to do?Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:07:06 GMTIgnacio A. Salom Rangelhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxgreat work! I like it but could not do much for remote servers...Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:01:48 GMTtajuddin335http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspx[quote][b]paul.t.silvey (9/8/2008)[/b][hr]Automate this stuff.... why manually look... but do not have you database server watch itself. That is like an internal investigation. Not much checks and balances there.[/quote]I agree it's not the best idea to rely on a server checking itself. If you have multiple servers then have the servers checking each other. Have them provide daily reports, that way you have an extra chance of becoming aware of a problem if you do not receive the report(s).Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:32:55 GMTAlvin Ramardhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxOnly 3 what?Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:16:16 GMTdawidjordaanhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxAutomate this stuff.... why manually look... but do not have you database server watch itself. That is like an internal investigation. Not much checks and balances there.You need an external computer that your helpdesk or console operators knows is up and running.It should be able to watch the disk space, jobs, performance, etc... and most importantly contact you via email, page, etc...I learned a long long long time ago, that a computer does a whole lot better job in watching your systems then you do manually.Some example of monitors that I haved: Argent, kshost (simple, but it worked), and my own developed in house. There are a lot of applications out there.Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:44:03 GMTpaul.t.silveyhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxThank you for taking time to read my article. I appreciate the insight of each poster. I posted my initial comments on 4/14/2008. However, let me reiterate that I wrote this article to challenge those who do not yet have a checklist to develop one. To the shops that do have a checklist, I desired to offer my ideas to improve their shops even more. I also appreciate your comments, so that I may improve my process.Thanks,Bill Richards, MCSE, MCDBASenior Database AnalystMon, 08 Sep 2008 06:39:27 GMTBill Richards-377350http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxAll, I understand that checking backups, space and error can be tedious if you have to do that for a lot of servers. I designed simple tools using DTS packages in SQL 2000 to monitor 3 things out this checklist. Below are the articles. I wrote about how you can set up these tools in your environment. I am in process of rewriting them using SQL 2005 SSIS and will post when its ready.Backup SLA Reporthttp://www.sql-server-performance.com/articles/dba/monitor_with_dts_p1.aspxErrorlog Monitoring of SQL Servershttp://www.sql-server-performance.com/articles/dba/monitor_with_dts2_p1.aspxSpace Monitoring of SQL Servershttp://www.sql-server-performance.com/articles/dba/monitor_with_dts3_p1.aspxSat, 06 Sep 2008 13:03:02 GMTneeraj_nagpalhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxHi,If are REALLY a DBA you automate all this stuff. Use alerts to tell you when your backups fail or when a server hits a system fault. I send mine to mainframe.Use free tools that you can automate with batch or command files to get info on the disk space of the servers. I use srvinfo.exe to scan the entire network for SQL Servers and get the free space on each. I have this info in my inbox every morning.That gives me plenty of time to catch up on the news while drinking my first cup of tea.Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:54:11 GMTdon_goodmanhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxdawidjordaan - Only 3?We have two DBA's, a backup DBA and two others who have rights to check as needed. In one of my roles, Data Security, I have access to all of the development environments and read in all of production. I also am checking on metadata and status of some of the data in certain databases beyond disk space etc. It is critical that we use a checklist. I need to update mine, thanks for the excellent article and the reminder.Miles...Fri, 05 Sep 2008 08:48:51 GMTMiles Nealehttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxI agree with almost everything said in this thread. I just want to add, as an old school DBA (20 years Oracle and SQL Server from the early Sybase days) that the one thing I would add is that you should run your check list at least 3 times a day. If you are good at it, it should not take more than 10 minutes (in a smaller environment). In a big environment you will HAVE to use tools and scripts. I am currently in a very big environment (over 800 Production databases and over 3000 Test and Dev databases - 2/3 Oracle, 1/3 SQL Server) and you cannot manage this without a mixture of tools and scripts. I cannot agree more with the person that mentioned the 3 tiered monitoring environment. For those of you that do not know how to handle scripting in Windows, use Perl. In our current environment, I have a mailbox set up for Oracle and one for SQL Server. It gets 1000s of emails per day from these scripts and tools. These emails are in 3 basic buckets i.e. Informational (Size of objects/disks, Status of databases/objects i.e. SS Recovery Model), Warning (Disk has 10% free space) and Error (Cannot connect to DB). Errors automatically log a ticket. These scripts run on specific timed intervals i.e. Information is once a day or once a week. The others will fire every 30 minutes if the first one was not successful etc, etc, etc.So, to stop the rambling - Run through your check list at least 3 times a day - OR - script your monitoring to continuously monitor and alert you.BTW - I fully endorse the new Quest Spotlight for SQL Server Enterprise. It even monitors your OS and keeps a history that you can play back later. My only con for it is that it does not use SNMP so I cannot plug it into the monitoring software the rest of the company uses.Fri, 05 Sep 2008 08:41:53 GMTdawidjordaanhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxOn the Oracle side of life, there is Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM). Which can detect and act (e-mail, page) upon found problems. I'll stay tuned to see what SQL server has (since our group now supports both).A good general tool is BigBrother. Which is/was free open source software and is also available in commercial form from Quest Software (who also make Toad and other database tools). BB is a great tool that our group has set up to monitor all sorts of things. We have a small group that manages many systems worldwide in a manufacturing setting (as in 24X7). The screaming in our world doesn't wait for 8AM. All of our critical BB messages go to a custom e-mail account which is synced to the group on-call phone (bat phone ;) that we pass around (weekly schedule). We also use Sharepoint to host all our system log files where we keep notes of every change made. And to cap it all off, we have a running forum list of every incident worth mentioning. We probably monitor about 20 different systems, each with their own custom scripts of applications and stuff they're monitoring.It is a bit of a pain to set up and make all this work well, but the payoff - we don't have a morning check list at all, all our notes, dates, times are online for anyone in the group to review via the web. Paper? Binder? That's so last century ;)Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:35:38 GMTJohn Summershttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxA great article. I have a handful of servers that are monitored daily and in addition to being proactive to failed jobs, we also monitor for those instances when jobs haven't run. (When another db admin has disabled a job in error or sql service stopped and the lan group didn't act/notify the dba..hmmmm)I am lucky enough that we only have about 10 servers to monitor but on 2 servers there are several internal (non-maintenance) daily/weekly/monthly jobs that also need to be monitored and are highly critical for the production world. I have this process down to approx. 10min/day max to check jobs (which includes the "paper trail" we need to keep our auditors satisfied).. This is as simple as knowing how many jobs should run and running a sql stmt which tells me the # of rows (representing jobs/steps) and their outcome. Granted, this is quite a menial process of checking but when an issue arises, it generally requires more knowledge/skills to resolve that the norm.. plus I prefer early mornings for this as it also allows that quite time to actually multi-task and get some productive work accomplished before the real world awakens..Fri, 05 Sep 2008 04:10:55 GMTdebmedhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspx[quote][b]rubes (4/14/2008)[/b][hr]Nice article. I would just like to point out that for those of us that have numerous servers, automation of the checklist is critical. If you're dealing with only one server, manually checking these things does not take a lot of time. But imagine checking job failures or drive space on 50 sql servers. We get paid too much to perform these menial tasks by hand. There are many 3rd party tools out there that do this for us. It's also pretty easy to write your own scripts and sql jobs... many starter scripts could probably be found on this forum. One benefit of automating your checklist is time. The other benefit is proactive in nature. If a drive is out of space because tempdb exploded in size over night, it's better to get notified via email at 4 am. Sure, the cell phone disturbs your precious sleep, but you now have 4 hours to fix the situation before business opens at 8 am and people start screaming.Also, if there are numerous DBAs on your team, automating these checks helps greatly with standardization.[/quote]A good article and I totally agree with Rubes regarding the number of servers in your environment. My daily check list is very similar to the one in the article but this has become a weekly check list due to the time its takes & number of sql servers. I now have time allocated to automating the process and will be hunting SQLServerCentral for automation topics. Automation it crucial in larger environments.Fri, 05 Sep 2008 03:47:08 GMTGary Morganhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxHi, sorry I rated this with one star by mistake, meant to give it 5 as is very useful article, but clicked on first star to drag to five, which isn't how it works....dohFri, 05 Sep 2008 00:00:35 GMTskenziehttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxDear Richard,Tks, I will try remedy given by you.Shall contact you in case of any query.Regards,Ritesh MehtaTue, 15 Apr 2008 07:30:16 GMTRitesh Mehtahttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxThabks for a good article. In my previous company, I used to handle near about 300 db servers with data aggregate to 13+TB. I was assigned o build the production dba team. During the team build, the projects used to grow further so everything was difficult initially.We used a 3 tier monitoring system, with a third part tool moniotoring the application response, round trip time, uptime and numerous other things. Any fall in the response time used to send us emails and pages. The next tier was a tool that used to check the server side - cpu, disk space, port checkings etc. The next level was our custom written wmi, SQL DMO scripts. DMO really helped in doing almost all types of audits. I would recommend using SMO (DMO being deprecated in 2005) and write our own custom scripts to check virtually everything.[url=http://rajanjohn.blogspot.com/][/url]Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:14:44 GMTrajankjohnhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxThis is nice article & useful... not bad!Great post here!Thnx! ;)Tue, 15 Apr 2008 02:52:25 GMTDugihttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxNice article. A Good list to carry with. :)Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:50:45 GMTAnipaulhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic484212-1218-1.aspxThis is definitely a good starting point for what should be monitored. The majority of this list can be automated relatively easily, which generally makes more sense than requiring an actual signature.Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:59:27 GMTtimothyawiseman