It sounds simple and logical doesn’t it.  One could say it is common sense right?  How many of us are failing to do this simple task?  It could be things as simple as having a monitor tracking successful backups, amount for free disk space on a drive or the amount of free space in your data files.  It could also be more advanced items such as taking a base line of performance metrics at regular intervals to properly track the health of your system.  Regardless of how trivial the task or how complex and advanced it is, if you are not measuring the item, then how can you manage it?

Lets look at physical drive space.  In order to manage available drive space and to ensure you have enough free space you have to be measuring the amount of free space available.  You don’t want to wait for that phone call from end users that a system is down only to discover that your disk is full.  How long would it take for your Systems Engineer to allocate more space?

How do you answer the question to your boss that the system you manage went offline due to something 100% preventable?

The challenge for you today is to make a list of all those things that you are expected to do and see if you are measuring them.  If you aren’t, put together a task list of how you can get there.  Make this a priority.  Many of the items we need to measure can be tracked very easily and either t-sql scripts or Posh scripts already exist to gather those metrics.  All you have to do is implement them.

Best of luck!