3 Things – Don’t Be Complacent with Your Servers
Systems are pretty forgiving these days. It leads to a potentially much less urgent management of servers when it comes to performance, disaster recovery and more. I’ve talked with more and more different companies and DBAs about their priorities and it’s clear that what used to be key to a DBA-type position is losing out to creating new information systems.
While it’s critical to provide those support elements to your company and/or clients, it’s also incredibly important that you keep an eye on the fundamental components of your systems as well. Here are three things that deserve attention and can mean the difference between success and failure with your systems.
1. Performance
Look through your servers – how are hardware resources being used? Any surprises in memory, disk space, database growth, etc? Check your indexes – do you have indexes that you need (check out DMVs to find indexes that may be helpful start with sys.dm_db_missing_index_details) – just give your systems a good once-over to make sure the applications and solutions you’re supporting are still performing as people would like.
2. Disaster Recovery
Can’t say it enough – check on those backups, and what you’re doing with them. Are they still happening as you need? Are the backups complete? Do they include EVERYTHING you’d need to rebuild a system? Do you have documented "pick up the pieces" help and is it still correct and complete? One thing to check that is often missed are any changes that are needed at the application level for recovery. As applications are updated, changed and used differently, it’s quite possible that the recovery process changes as well.
3. Any Unusual Errors?
Check the logs – anything unusual there? Any jobs not firing? Why? Any other issues you may not be aware of on the systems? You can get a very quick look at how things are working by looking through the logs and looking for errors (not just informational messages).
What are your quick checks? Have you had any surprises lately?