Robert Hermsen (10/27/2008)

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I would suggest taking it another step. It may require some dreaded overtime to get in place but is well worth it. We are dba's not secretaries or monkeys.

Automate it. Then the data can be stored into a repository automatically and you can use ssrs or excell or whatever to view your trends and histories.

Steve Jones - Editor (10/27/2008)

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To me these are things that are daily checks, things you need to make sure are available if you get called when you're on-call. Issues should be documented and also raised as some sort of turnover for the next person to be aware of.

My goal has always been to automate these things, but also to proactively manage the systems, looking to catch things before they fail so that you're not getting called!

tjaybelt (10/27/2008)

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I can see automating some of the items i have detailed. But you are correct, some manual intervention still needs too occur, to ensure that your systems are in proper working order.
Something that can gather and store the historical data would be nice. Automating some of the data gathering would be nice. But having a human DBA look at it, still seems like a necessity.

Another DBA here just went on call this week, and thought to grab snapshots with SQL Compare as part of his on0call duties. Nice addition. If something goes wonky during the week, we have a snapshot to compare with...