I'm in an environment where the core of the business relies on leased software solutions. That means I am not allowed to do any creative stuff at all apart from maintaining HA and DR and index maintenance.

All SQL Server agent jobs have a notification steps for success and failure so I only need to do a cursory check from time to time. I have also put in place about 25 alerts watching critical error conditions.

On each instance, I set up a job that gathers server vital information such as space, latency, config changes, critical entries in errorlog, memory dumps etc at 60 min interval to store in a set of what I call Server-Vital tables. A second job would pull together everything in html format twice a day and email me. It is mostly for quick reference and record keeping.

On a sentry box, I have a custom script that watches the Server-Vital tables at a 15-min interval. This script is central to my monitoring. It analyses the server vitals and notify me of things out of ordinary. If nothing is found, it sends an reassuring message.

All as far as monitoring goes, I rely on my phone only. I spend the rest of my time at work on exploring performance tuning and security-related topics. That's why I'm here.