SentryOne and SQL Server Agent Jobs

There are so many cool, exciting new features in SQL Server these days! Polybase, Query Store, R Services, Stretch Databases, and the list goes on! This post isn’t about any of those. SQL Server Agent jobs aren’t new or cool or sexy, but I honestly don’t know what I’d do without them. I remember a few years back I was testing things out and using an Express Edition of SQL Server. SQL Server Agent Jobs are fundamental for maintenance tasks, reporting on database health and status, ensuring that processes run on a regular schedule, and any number of other processes.

How do I keep track of all of those SQL Server jobs?

The Event Calendar in SentryOne provides an easy to way to visualize all of the jobs – whether across an instance, or across your whole enterprise:

Figure 1 : The SentryOne Event Calendar

Aside from being able to see SQL Server job schedules, the Event Calendar also allows you to see the average runtime and, for historical events, actual runtime and the success or failure of these jobs. You can even see the step level status on multi-step SQL Server Agent jobs. Within the Event Calendar, you can also filter your view to see those events that are important to you, e.g. all of the failed jobs in the last 24 hours. If there are items that you filter for regularly, you can also save those as Custom Event Views. If you would like to learn more about filtering the Event Calendar and using Custom Event Views, please read Visualizing Jobs (and more!) in Event Manager

Environment-Wide Workflows

Another piece of helpful functionality is the ability to create event chains, which can be helpful in designing workflows.

Event Chain

Within event chains, you can control what happens after a job completes, and whether it succeeds or fails. Jobs can be from any of the instances that you are monitoring with SentryOne, so this is a simple way to create workflows across multiple servers. And this isn’t restricted to SQL Server Agent jobs – you can include Windows Scheduled tasks in event chains as well. If you’d like to learn more about event chains, please read Event Chains in Event Manager.

If you haven’t looked at the SentryOne toolset, I invite you to download a trial version and see what SentryOne can do for your environment.

Lori Edwards

Lori (@loriedwards) has been with SentryOne since 2013, and has recently transitioned from her role as Senior Solutions Engineer to Training Manager. She is responsible for all learning strategy and architecture, including building, executing, measuring, and evaluating training for SentryOne. Lori is also currently serving as a Director at Large for PASS.

Lori shares tips and tidbits for DBAs picked up over years of working as a DBA, as well as stories about her job here. Whether you are a new DBA who wants to learn or someone interested in learning about what it is like to work for SentryOne, be sure to check out Lori’s blog.