Greetings,

I'm looking for a little guidance. I work for a medium sized bank
with about 20 SQL servers in 2 locations. We have two backup schemes -
Less critical SQL boxes have nightly DB backups and Transaction Log
dumps, more critical boxes have additional hourly transaction dumps.
The database maintenance should be deleting any backups more than 2
days old (Should have been picked up by system backups and moved to SAN
by then).

My question: Sometimes the SQL backups fail, usually for lack of
disk space. As it stands now it's a tedious process of reviewing the
logs of each of the 20 servers to check for failure. Is there a product
that can centralize these logs or give meaningful errors on failure?

I'm not real keen on using the email/pager reporting function from
the DB Maintenance. We have 4 techs who rotate on reviewing the logs
and we don't want to receive unnecessary emails 75% of the time or have
to change the account info every week.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank,

Jim

SQLMaint which is what the maintenance wizard is configuring jobs for and
running is a bit cautious or wasteful depending on how you look at it. It
will create the latest backup before deleting the old one so during the
backup the server consumes more disk than expected. Most DBAs end up
writing a set of scripts to maintain the health of their databases. As for
SQL mail, I don't particularly care for it either. In SQL 2005 there will
be an smtp sender that you can use to replace most of what SQL mail does.
Until then try building a command line or batch file and using xp_cmdshell
with a freeware smtp product like BLAT. With multiple servers to monitor
and maintain, write flexible scripts and pool the alerts to one server and
alert from there.

There may be products on the market for many of these tasks, but with a
little creativity everything you need is there.

Good luck.

"Oddsavant" <Jim.Thompson@unionfedbank.com> wrote in message
news:1110422663.936286.242260@o13g2000cwo.googlegr oups.com...
> Greetings,
>
> I'm looking for a little guidance. I work for a medium sized bank
> with about 20 SQL servers in 2 locations. We have two backup schemes -
> Less critical SQL boxes have nightly DB backups and Transaction Log
> dumps, more critical boxes have additional hourly transaction dumps.
> The database maintenance should be deleting any backups more than 2
> days old (Should have been picked up by system backups and moved to SAN
> by then).
>
> My question: Sometimes the SQL backups fail, usually for lack of
> disk space. As it stands now it's a tedious process of reviewing the
> logs of each of the 20 servers to check for failure. Is there a product
> that can centralize these logs or give meaningful errors on failure?
>
> I'm not real keen on using the email/pager reporting function from
> the DB Maintenance. We have 4 techs who rotate on reviewing the logs
> and we don't want to receive unnecessary emails 75% of the time or have
> to change the account info every week.
>
> Any suggestions would be appreciated.
>
> Thank,
>
> Jim
>