I 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.