Friday, 27 September 2013

SQL Server Monitoring Checklist

1. Make sure each of your production databases are available and accessible to their users.
2. Check all processes – such as clustering, replication, service broker, log shipping, database mirroring – to verify that they are running correctly.
3. Check OS, SQL Server, Security, and other logs for unusual events.
4. Verify that all scheduled jobs have run successfully, including checking for long running or “hung” jobs.
5. Confirm that backups have been made and successfully saved to a secure location.
6. Monitor disk space to ensure your SQL Servers won’t run out of disk space. For best performance, all disks should have 15% or more of free space.
7. Throughout the day, periodically monitor SQL Server performance using Performance Monitor, Profiler/SQL Trace, or other performance monitoring tools.
8. Regularly monitor and identify blocking issues.
9. Keep a log of any changes you make to servers, including documentation of any performance issues you identify and correct.
10. Regularly restore backups to a test server in order to verify that you can restore them. You don’t need to restore all backups every day, but do so often to ensure that you are confident you have good backups.
11. Take some time to learn something new as a DBA to further your professional development.
12. Automate as many of these day-to-day tasks as possible.

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