rubes (4/14/2008)
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.
I totally agree with automation being essential. We shouldn't need to manually check all these things esp where there are a lot of servers involved.
Essentially as DBA's we want to know about backups, Jobs' status, Disk space usage vs free space (free space within db files as well as at total drive capacity), auditing (configuration changes, failed passwords, database growth), SQL error log messages , number of page splits, locking and a lot more besides.
There are a variety of ways that you can achieve the above with a combination of Alerts, querying system tables, performance monitoring and third party tools.
The thing to do is to find the best fit for you and your organisation with the infrastructure you have and the time you are allowed to devote to implementing a solution.