Hope you all had a good weekend, the Lions won so I’m pretty happy.

Over the weekend I was thinking about the alert system that I have in place at my current position. A good alerting system is (obviously) essential for any DBA to have in place but we all know that’s not enough right?

No matter how good your alerts are, detailed monitoring of your systems is also essential.

Detailed monitoring will allow you to catch issues before they occur, taking you from “fire fighting” issues and actively working towards keeping your system stable.

However, the processes around your monitoring system(s) are also just as important. I’ve worked for companies were it was a requirement to spend pretty much all of each morning meticulously checking off tasks in excel spreadsheets, in order to retain a detailed history.

For me, that’s an example of a bad monitoring process. There’s a lot of very good monitoring tools out there that automatically record stats for us and provide reporting.

Monitoring tools are there to allow us as DBAs to quickly observe and review our systems and that good work is wiped out by having to manually enter data. We don’t want to performing manual tasks, we want to be working on our current projects.

So if you’re in a position were you need to be entering in data manually, you should check out dbatools.io

dbatools is a project written by DBAs for DBAs. There’s over 200 commands there that will allow you to quickly analyse your suite of servers, pulling back whatever stats you need. Do away with that manual data entry, there’s a better way

Have a good week!