I saw a post recently where someone was asking about a "database health report, " and while I had some ideas, I wasn't sure what would be in there. Actually the author sent me an email and I wasn't sure how to answer it, so I referred him to the forums.
However I thought it was an interesting question. I haven't really seen a standard report that I'd say covers "database health" though I thought that I should poll a few other (smarter) people in the SQL Server community. So for this Friday's poll:
What's in a healthy database report?
The post talks about a health report for management, and I'm not sure there is a standard idea of what's in one. I think that there are really two reports here that need to be addressed in my mind. There's a technical report for the DBA and then there is likely some more business oriented report for management.
For the DBA, anything works as long as it provides the information you need to prevent issues. I prefer proactive reports that let me know only about things I need to look at or be concerned with. I hate getting reports of things like "the backup completed." I assume it did and only need to see a report if something didn't work.
For management, however, I think that a health report would be more of a Dashboard, something that shows that the database is doing something for the business. They wouldn't care about disk space or CPU, but they might care about # of transactions, average time to complete some task, or some other metric that means something to business people.
However I think that some of you might have other ideas, or have even built something like this. So share your answers I the discussion below and help other DBAs out.
Steve Jones
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