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.
Seconded.
For Oracle we aggregate results of overnight operations across all databases into one email (this includes known databases where something should have happened and didn't)
We then have an auto generated service call where the reactive DBA for the day lists the errors and what he/she did about them.
I would like to do the same for SQL Server, but my knowledge is limited and hence we still have a very manual process on SQL Server.