SQL Server Daily Operational Tasks (Part 1: Building Your Daily Checklist)

Today we will start introducing a series of posts that talk about an interesting and crucial topic in SQL Server operations which is “the daily operational tasks”.

Your daily operational tasks simply represent your first line defense against all threats you may fear of as a DBA and also keep doing it on daily basis is considered as a kind of proactive support to your data platform.

That is why you need to start your day by going through these tasks and in order to unify this process, you simply need to design a “checklist”.

Before we start designing this checklist, we have first to define what items should be included in this list or in a different word, what are the parts inside your data platform that need to be checked on daily basis?

In all environments I worked in, I used to check the following sections on daily basis:

1. SQL Server servers disk free space.
2. SQL Server services status.
3. SQL Server server’s windows event viewer errors & Warnings.
4. SQL Server cluster status.
5. SQL Server logs errors and warnings.
6. SQL Server Databases Backup status (system/user DBs)
7. SQL Server Agent jobs status.

Also one of the best practices is to record your daily checks result in a spreadsheet like excel file in order to keep track with your day-to-day operational issues.

Below is a snapshot of the daily check list sample sheet.

Next Step:

In the next post we will check together the different ways to collect such information in order to be able to do your daily task with both speed and efficiency.