Instead of email alerts – monitoring SQL Server jobs

Anyone out there who has been tasked with monitoring SQL Server jobs running on multiple servers knows what a pain that is. First you have to spend hours going through the process of setting up email profiles for SQL Server Agents on each and every one of the servers to be monitored so that you can get email notifications if a job fails or some other condition occurs. Next, despite your effort and unquestionable diligence you have to come to terms with the fact that sometimes those email alerts may be delayed and some other times may never reach the intended destination so once in a while you must log in and check those server logs to make sure everything ran correctly (imagine having to check 20 or 30 logs) and then if you see something that did not run correctly you will need to use SSMS to navigate to the given job on the given server to see what happened.

So, what is a DBA to do? Well, fortunately the solution is very simple – it is called RSS Reporter for SQL Server (http://www.xsql.com/products/rss_reporter/) - it is free for one SQL Server instance and extremely affordable for more instances. You simply add each server you need to monitor into the RSS Reporter workspace, set the options to filter only the jobs and conditions you want and the RSS Reporter automatically generates an aggregate feed that gives you a complete view of all the jobs from all the servers and even better, it allows you to drill down on each job and view the details. You can subscribe to and read the feed from any device without having to worry that the alerts are not coming. You go on vacation – no worries – someone else can easily monitor the job status feed – nothing to setup or configure, the other user simply subscribes to the same feed you get. Now that’s beautiful!

Check it out for yourself and spread the word to the community – let’s not keep it a secret anymore.