DBA Daily Checklist
DBA Daily Checklist - As a DBA it is very good practice to ‘check’ or monitor your SQL Instances on regular basis. (These tasks are normally undertaken daily hence the title DBA Daily Checklist). The purpose of this article is to provide a list of the checks that I make on each instance every morning. If you have anything to add, or think I have missed something important please let me know.
The following list contains ten checks that I make daily, it the first thing that I do each day on every SQL instance that I support. It is possible to automate many of these checks but as long as the number of instances is manageable I prefer to also check them manually, that way I can pick up on anything I find untoward. Obviously if you look after a couple of hundred instances, which I have done with previous clients you have to automate the checking process or you won’t get through them all in time. Anyway this is my DBA daily checklist: - Check Connectivity of Each instance – At minimum I would check the SQL Server Service the SQL Agent Service were running and the I could connect to each of them through management studio
- Check database and transaction log backups – Ensure you can execute you backup/recovery plan if needed.
- Check for failed jobs – Check that other jobs such as overnight batch processing SSIS jobs have completed successfully. Investigate failures and find the reason for the failure
- Check processes– such as replication/log shipping etc are running correctly. You can replication monitor to monitor replication.
- Storage – check disk space; ensure that each instance has adequate disk space to keep functioning.
- Database Sizes/Free Space - Checks Database File sizes, I’m not a huge fan of database auto grow, if it is used, I like to specify the amount of space a database grows by in megabytes, not as a percentage. If I can get away without it and manually expand the database myself as needed then that is my preferred option. Mainly because I get to decide on the timing of the growth and it can be scheduled not to interfere with database activity during busy times. To manually grow the database you need to monitor your database file sizes and the amount of free space to judge when the database needs to be expanded.
- Security (Check for failed logins) – I setup all my production servers, as per Microsoft’s recommendation to log failed logins; you can then examine the SQL log to check for any failed logins and investigate any irregularities.
- Check SQL Error Log – looking for anything irregular including the output of DBCC CHECKDB.
- Windows event log – check the event log for anything unusual.
- Performance – Check on application performance and investigate any issues.
The DBA daily checklist above, represents a list of things I check each morning on my SQL server instances obviously if my checks identify any issues with the respective instance then I spend time, depending on the urgency of the problem, after completing my checks on each instance fixing the issues. I document any issues I find and any resolutions I implement usually in the run book for that instance. More on Run books in a later article.
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