John,

Thanks for posting. I've automated as many tasks as possible using a combination of TSQL, Powershell and VBscripts. One thing I have done is built a template and rolled it out to every instance (2005 and higher) that I administer. As a DBA who supports about 100 different instances (from version 2000 to 2008 R2 and everything in between.) this became absolutely necessary.

When I build an instance, I create a database on it used to gather performance statistics. It typically contains retention on the performance data of about 2 weeks. I then have a a template of queries used to analyze the data to obtain the typical load the server is incurring. Which really simplifies the process and frees up my time.