Runaway Job

[briangriffin]

I have a job scheduled via SQL Server Agent that has been running successfully every 15 minutes for many months. Today a user alerted me that the resulting data seemed stale, and when I looked in the job history the most recent instance was several hours ago. There was no stop date on the job.

I tried starting it manually but got the message that it couldn't start because a prior instance of the job was currently running. I restarted the service and was able to run the job manually. I assume that the schedule will pick up again in 15 minutes.

My question is how would I have known about this problem, with no failure message and nothing in history?

 

[fredericofonseca]

job, as you saw by the message you got, was running still - on this case you can only see it on job activity monitor.
as for what the job is doing at the moment it it is a SQL step you can use sp_whoisactive (

http://whoisactive.com/downloads/)

to see what it is doing and if it has any blockers
if it is a SSIS Catalog job you can see it on the catalog.
if it is a powershell or command line job its harder unless the script/program it is running has a log of activities being done.

Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com

FAQ219-2884
FAQ181-2886