As part of a SQL server monitoring review and agent upgrade, I was asked by the Tivoli Engineer to create a list of situations , that monitoring would be useful. The architecture used is Tivoli Monitoring /

 Some considerations are:

1)By commiting to having to many situations monitored – “white noise” can distract from the critical situations. For example, receiving notification on every block – may obfuscate , some critical space full.

2)DBAs are busy – assessing every situation can be time consuming – therefore the notifications must be relevant

3)We are focusing here on monitoring situations – i.e a certain threshold has been reached or an event has been triggered which will notify the DBA. This is distinct from daily reporting which focuses more on preventative actions

As a first attempt the SQL Server  list is:

MS_SQL_DB_Space_Pct_Used_Crit (database space used > 90%)

MS_SQL_DB_Status_Crit   (database status does not equal vailable)

MS_SQL_DB_Suspect_Crit  (database in suspect mode)

MS_SQL_Log_Freespace_Critical  (Log freespace < 10%)

MS_SQL_Status_Critical   (If Status = Inactive)

MS_SQL_MS_Device_Free_Critical  (Percent of Device free is < = 5)

MS_SQL_MS_Job_Failure_Critical (Monitors SQL Server Jobs)

MS_SQL_IO_Disk_Errors_Crit    (Any io errors greater than 0)

MS_SQL_NT_Free_Disk_Warning  (Based on NT_Logical_Disk_Space_Warning)

MS_SQL_NT_SQL_Services_Fatal  (Monitors SQL Server and SQL Agent Services)

MS_SQL_UDB_SQL_Fail_High  (An application experiences too many SQL statements failures)

 I intentionally haven’t included OS monitoring .

 It would be good to hear some feedback from other DBAs , and get a feel for the critical ones

Ref:Jack Vamvas (http://www.sqlserver-dba.com)