Recently, a friend of mine recounted to me the story of a DBA colleague who'd been assessing a new SQL monitoring solution, to replace the hand-rolled scripts that had been in place for years, but were so hard to maintain. The new tool summarized in a digestible form lots of information about resource usage, backups, long running queries, job status on so on, on their SQL Server instances. Apparently, he rejected it for this reason! Because, "Why would I want the boss to be able to see so easily every little bad thing that happens on my servers?"

You said what? Really? ARE YOU SERIOUS? Surely, you don't honestly believe that hiding from your boss news of server down time, missing backups, poor performance, failed deployments, is in any way a good idea? One that is likely to enhance your career and employment prospects? Hey, maybe you're right. When the server goes boom (listen to Ivonava, there's always a BOOM coming), and you don't have backups in place because they've been failing for a week, maybe the boss is going to pat you on the back and say, "Thanks for withholding that news about periodically failing backups. I would only have worried." Or maybe not.

Let me break the bad news to you. Hiding critical information about an organization's IT infrastructure is never a good idea. It is never a career enhancer. If you know that backups are offline, you must tell someone. They have to know. Failing to do so could cost everyone their job, not just you.

Of course, some bosses are more sensitive than others, and if all you ever do is bring problems, and no solutions, you might get sidelined or let go. So don't do that. Instead, go to your boss and say, "Hey, looks like the backups went offline last week, so we're not quite on the SLA at the moment in terms of recovery, but, I've already started troubleshooting the issue and I think I have a solution. Should be in place before lunch."

If you really can't fix the problem then, hard as it may be, you need to let your boss know that. You may feel like this will reflect badly on you, and damage your career prospects. Yes, it's a risk. But then again, maybe they will bring in a consultant to help you out or send you out to training. You might be rolling the dice a little with your personal situation to inform them, but you're rolling the dice HUGE for the entire organization to hide things.

Please, don't be that person.

Grant Fritchey (Guest Editor)