How often have you been caught off guard by some issue with one of your databases? I would guess most people have received a phone call, email, or trouble ticket that alerts them to the fact that something has gone wrong. A few of you might have even had an irate customer or manager wander over to your desk and loudly inform you of an issue. Those are not great times, and most of us would prefer to find out about problems before others bring them to our attention.

This past week was the 66th T-SQL Tuesday blog party. If you haven't heard of it, I would encourage you to look each month for the announcement on Twitter and participate. It's a great chance to share some knowledge, and showcase your own experiences or viewpoint on a particular topic. I'd actually encourage all of you to go back and write posts about the past topics at some point. It's a great way to challenge yourself to document your own experiences in a concrete way.

The theme this month was monitoring (thanks to Catherine Wilhelmsen b | t), and this is exactly the way that you build awareness in your environment. Monitoring allows you to ensure that you, as the DBA, learn about issues, or potential issues, first. Monitoring doesn't solve your problems; that's up to you to do, but it can help you proactively detect issues early and perhaps mitigage them before users notice them.

The blog entries this month cover all sorts of issues that you might think about watching for. The 825 errors in your log, metadata about your backups, jobs, and more. There's a variety of posts that cover all sorts of home grown systems, as well as noting that third party products work well. You have a huge variety of choices, from building your own tools and processes or purchasing something like SQL Monitor from Red Gate. However no matter what your budget, resources, time, desire, and more, I'd highly recommend that you really think about ensuring that you are monitoring your systems in a way that lets you know how things are working.

What to do when they're working poorly, that's up to you. Hopefully the information we publish at SQLServerCentral, and the links we send out every week from Database Weekly, can help you learn to be better at your job.