Saving Time with Proactive DBA Monitoring

A typical day for the DBA usually starts with an overall health check of the database servers in the network. No matter how big or small the environment, the database administrator usually finds himself doing more or less the same type of checks every day.

If the DBA is responsible for ten production SQL Server instances, each hosting three databases on average - it would be thirty production databases to look after. Each morning the DBA would want to know if the instances are all up and running and accepting user connections. Next, he would probably want to see if overnight backups were all successful. When that is ascertained, perhaps the attention would turn to scheduled jobs. There may be regular processes that are critical to the business – like an SSIS package or a reporting job. If nothing has failed in that front, it would be time to check the Windows Event Log and the SQL Error Log for any suspicious looking error messages. Finally, it will be prudent to see if replication has failed or mirroring has frozen or log shipping has broken.

These are only part of the day-to-day health checks and yet when done manually, can take a significant amount of time.

There are a number of tasks that you as the DBA can automate to make life easier and save time. Smart DBAs would always try to proactively check database and server health without waiting for something to happen or someone else reporting about them.

In this article I will try to present some ideas about how some of the daily database health checks can be automated and turned into proactive monitoring. Although database monitoring is not a new idea and there are quite a few third party tools in the market, it may be cost prohibitive for some organisations. The alternative is to build a custom monitoring solution.