March 2013 – Monthly SQL Server Checklist

by Jason S, posted in SQL Server, SQLServerSyndication

data centerIt’s the first Monday of the month, do you know where your servers are?

Hopefully, they are still in your data center.  If not, I’m not sure this post will help you out, so you better just call the police.  But if they are in your data center, then do you know how they are behaving.

As usual, you should be checking your SQL Server environment monthly to be certain that things are as expected.  If you are unsure what needs to be checked in your environment on a monthly basis, check out the SQL Server Monthly Checklist that I provide on this blog. It covers pretty much everything that should be checked. If you see anything missing from that list, please leave a comment on this post.

Checklist Updates

There are just a couple changes to the checklist since last month, these updates include:

If you have time to take a look at it, the SQL Server 2012 Product Guide to see how you can use SQL Server in your environment.

CROWD SOURCE BACKUP VALIDATION

Going to try this for another month since there weren’t any comments for the last attempt.  One of the sections of the monthly checklist is the backup validation section.  The section currently includes the following bullet points:

  • Check everything involved in the backup process.
  • Are your backups executing as desired?
  • Are the monitoring jobs properly alerting to failures?
  • Have their been any unexpected failures?
  • Have backup duration times changed?

What links would you reference or recommend to others for these checklist items?  Let’s pull together some resource to give people a better idea on how to accomplish this task.

SOMETHING MISSING?

Is there something missing in this checklist or with the pages that has been overlooked?  Any cool links that would aid in the review of your SQL Server environments?  If so, leave a comment below and I’ll take a look.