Have you made any New Year's Resolutions? Well, SentryOne would like to encourage you to resolve to improve your SQL Servers' health. And to help you out, I'd like to share some tips to improve the health of your SQL Servers.
Not sure what the Environment Health Overview (EHO) score is? Not to worry, check out this blog by Jason Hall which introduces the EHO. As a DBA, it gives me a sense of the overall state of my entire enterprise. My favorite way of thinking of the EHO score came from Lori Edwards, who likes to describe the EHO score as the DBA's "how busy am I going to be today" indicator.
Be sure to check your EHO daily, because it is based upon all Advisory Conditions that have been triggered within the past 24 hours.
Overwhelmed?
Do you manage a large SQL Server environment and find yourself overwhelmed by the number of Advisory Conditions that you're seeing on the Start Page? Make use of our filtering functionality. You can click on individual boxes to only show you Events by Severity or Tag.
Address by Severity
But be sure to not neglect Medium and Low severity Advisory Conditions. Many of the Advisory Conditions that fall under the lower severity levels are also ones that can be corrected with minimal effort. Be sure to at least skim through all Medium and Low severity Advisory Conditions, to see if there are any "low hanging fruit" that you can quickly and easily remedy or delegate.
Address SQL Server Best Practices
Many of the SentryOne supplied Advisory Conditions center around SQL Server Best Practices. Often, these are simple configuration changes that require minimal testing and validation, such as using Checksum for Torn Page Verification or High Performance Plan is Enabled/Disabled.
Prioritizing these sooner rather than later will not only improve the health of your individual SQL Servers, but bring your entire environment into alignment.
Disable What Does Not Apply
Out of the box, SentryOne has a large number of Advisory Conditions preconfigured. But there may be some that simply do not apply to your environment. Go ahead and take the time to disable them.
When I've monitored environments with SentryOne, I grouped servers by role: development, QA, staging, and production. Aside from helping me keep my servers organized, it also enabled me to create overrides at different levels of my hierarchy. For example, I could easily disable many alerts for monitored SQL Servers categorized under the Development group.
As a former DBA, I appreciate that we only have so many hours in the day to do all of the things required of us. But devoting a small slice of time every day to maintain and improve your server health will pay for itself in the long run. Leverage the Environment Health Overview score and Advisory Conditions, which are all there to help you quickly identify, triage, and resolve ailments in your SQL Server environment.
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