SQL Server Blog

I’ve seen a few posts about daily checks recently and thought I’d chip in.

What do I check and a very brief explanation why I perform this check.

Backups
- Have they all succeeded?
Disk Space
- Do we have plenty of space available for normal operations during business hours?
Database Size
- Have we seen a major increase in size (I monitor this because we manage client databases)

Scheduled Jobs
- Have any failed? Or do any of the steps have warnings?
Event Viewer (application, security, server)
- Any errors at all relating to Security, SQL Server, the OS, hardware etc
SQL Error Log
- Check the logs to ensure there are no errors, events raised which may be of concern
Cluster Log
- Are there any errors, warnings?
Replication Logs
- Are all subscriptions in sync?
Maintenance Reports
- Automated rebuilds/reorganization of indexes and updating of stats. What was done? What wasn’t done?
Monitoring System eMails
- Any alerts over night from any of the database servers, web servers, application servers?
Overnight processing eMails
- Did all batch jobs run as expected?

Most of these are now automated processes. I capture the data on a daily basis in a seperate database for trends analysis & capacity management.

I have been asked by people why do I do all this? Quite simply, to ensure the stability of my production environment. Now, we do use a monitoring tool which alerts us to low disk space, errors in logs etc, but if we did not have this, then how would I ever know that my drives were running low on space or how would I know that an overnight report for Sales, for example, has not run?

It can be a mundane process, for sure, but I’ve been performing these kind of checks for long enough, it has just become routine for me in all of my jobs.