Alert Notification When SQL Server Stops or Db Becomes Unavailable 1

[JohnBates]

hi everyone,

Are any of you using Alerts to notify you of certain situations - SQL Server service stops, a Db goes offline, etc?

I'd like to know what *you* are monitoring for and how?

Thanks, John

 

[mrdenny]

I use a third party monitoring tune called Servers Alive. I track the service status of both the SQL Service, and the SQL Agent. I also log into the database and query from the sys.database_files table to make sure that the database is online.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)
MCTS (SQL 2005 / Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Configuration / Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Configuration)
MCITP Database Administrator (SQL 2005) / Database Developer (SQL 2005)

My Blog

 

[JayKusch]

I too use a 3rd party app called SQL Spotlight that has email alerting and such.

The "catch-22" on using native alerting is that it will work fine in most cases (metrics being watched) but it will not catch the "SQL Server service" running or hung because ... if SQL is hung ... most of the time the alerts are hung to and will not be sent out.

You could write a quick and dirty ping batch file that could test if SQL is responding.

Thanks

J. Kusch

 

[mrdenny]

I'll clarify a little more since I did a crap job above.

I use Spotlight for my database specific monitoring within the database. For the general is the server up I use servers alive as that's what I use for the Web servers, file servers, DCs, etc. I also haven't gotten around to setting up the mail settings in Spotlight for SQL Server.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)
MCTS (SQL 2005 / Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0: Configuration / Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007: Configuration)
MCITP Database Administrator (SQL 2005) / Database Developer (SQL 2005)

My Blog