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Author  Topic  angusl Starting Member 6 Posts Posted - 2005-10-31 : 04:23:51 Hi, I administered SQL Server for four years for a small number of non-critical applications, but have joined an organisation which uses SQL Server more seriously. The existing SQL Server monitoring is very "out of the box", so emails get sent when jobs fail. We have twenty something servers and two hundred (?) databases, so success notification is not something we can reliably check. The approach also fails to cater for email ceasing to work (it has happened), Agents not being started, jobs being disabled and not re-enabled, and more I am sure. I want to rationalise monitoring to parallel (functionally) the monitoring of our non-SQl databases. Using that approach, all jobs of a specific category are checked from a central server, and an email is sent in which the Subject indicates whether the email contains error details (so needs to be read) or whether the monitoring was successful and the email can be filed. I have considered several options and favour using linked servers from a central server to perform monitoring. The monitoring jobs would use local tables to target queries at a number of remote servers, at the end of which an email would be sent to indicate alarm or success. This would allow us to expect one email per day (or reporting period) per category, categories to include "backups", "space monitoring", "standby status" and perhaps one or two more generic. Before I embrace this approach I'd like to ask the more experienced SQL Server community whether this approach is unnecessary, lacks elegance or whether they have experience of an out the box product which does this for the DBA. I would really appreciate any feedback very much. Many thanks, and an apology as having posed this question I shall be out of touch for the next two and a half days, Angus