Chapter Ten

10Chapter Ten

Automating and Monitoring SQL Server 2000

10 Objectives

• Configure SQL Server Agent to automate the administration of SQL Server 2000

• Create and configure jobs, alerts and operators by using SQL Server Agent

• Monitor hardware resource usage and SQL Server activity by using the Windows System Monitor

10 SQL Server 2000 Automation

• Automated administration– Refers to a programmed response to a

predictable administrative task or event on the server

– Leveraging this functionality in SQL Server 2000 frees database administrators to focus on tasks that cannot be predicted

10 SQL Server Agent

• SQL Server Agent– Separate program that executes administrative tasks and

generates alerts defined by database administrators• SQL Server Agent can be used to:

– Execute administrative tasks– Detect system conditions and automatically instigate

measures to resolve– Alert people in a variety of ways

10 Jobs

• Jobs– Administrative

tasks defined once and executed as many times as necessary

Figure 10-1: SQL Server Agent architecture

10 Alerts

• Alerts– Actions on an instance of SQL Server 2000 in

response to a particular event or performance condition

– Commonly used to trigger notification of a problem to administrative users of a database known as operators

10 Operators

• Operators– Users who are often configured within an instance

of SQL Server 2000 to receive notification of particular jobs and alerts

– Operators can receive notification in one of three ways:• E-mail• Pager• The NET SEND command

10 Operators

• E-mail notifications– Provided through the SQL Mail service

• Pager notification– Actually an extension of the standard e-mail

notification in that only those pagers whose service providers handle e-mails for paging can be used

10 Operators

• NET send– Command-line application in Windows 2000 and Windows NT that

automatically forces a message box to pop up on a computer screen when the user is connected to the network

Figure 10-2: NET SEND message box

10 Multiserver Automation

Figure 10-3: Multiserver automation architecture

10 Multiserver Automation

• Master server– Houses a complete list of the various operations

(jobs) that must be performed on the various target servers

• Target server– An instance of SQL Server 2000 that connects to

the master server and receives jobs scheduled to be run locally when using multiserver automation

10 Configuring SQL Server Agent

Figure 10-4: General tab of the Properties window SQL Server Agent


• Advanced tab– Allows you

configure SQL Server Agent to monitor and restart SQL Server and SQL Server Agent services if they unexpectedly stop

Figure 10-5: Advanced tab of the SQL Server Agent Properties window


• Connection tab– Where

authentication credentials are specified for SQL Server Agent

Figure 10-6: Connection tab of the SQL Server Agent Properties window

10 Creating and ConfiguringJobs, Alerts and Operators

• Creating operators– To create operators in

Enterprise Manager, expand Management folder, expand SQL Server Agent node, right-click on operators node and click New Operators option from context-sensitive menu

Figure 10-7: General tab of the New Operators window

10 Creating and ConfiguringJobs, Alerts and Operators

Figure 10-8: Notification tab of the New Operator Properties window

10 Creating Operators with T-SQL Statements

• SQL Server 2000 provides several system-stored procedures for managing operators in the SQL Server Agent notification system– Since the msdb database stores all of the

information about operators, alerts and jobs, all of these procedures must be run from the msdb database

10 Creating Operators with T-SQL Statements

• The sp_operator system-stored procedure is used to add new operators

• The pagers_days parameter specifies the days on which the operators can receive pager notification

Table 10-1: Day Values for the Pager_days Parameter

10 Updating Operators in T-SQL

• The sp_update_operator system-stored procedure is used to modify the properties of existing operators– Accepts the same parameters as the

sp_add_operator procedure but requires that the name parameter be a valid existing operator

10 Viewing and Deleting Existing Operators in T-SQL

• The sp_help_operator system-stored procedure is used to return information about all of one of the operators defined in the msdb database for an instance of SQL Server 2000– When called without any parameters, the procedure returns

a result set containing the configurations for all operators in the system

– If the operator_name parameter is specified, only the information of that particular operator is returned

• To delete and existing operator, you would use the sp_delete_operator system-stored procedure

10 Viewing and Deleting Existing Operators in T-SQL

Figure 10-9: Results of the sp_help_operator system-stored procedure

10 Creating Jobs

Figure 10-10: General tab of the New Job Properties window (Figure 10-10 contains sample job information)

10 Creating Jobs

• Steps tab will show a list of all steps in a particular job

Figure 10-11: Steps tab of the New Job Properties window

10 Managing Job Steps

Figure 10-12: General tab of the New Job Step window


• There are three general types of steps:– T-SQL statements– Windows executable programs (.exe files)– ActiveX scripts

• In addition to these, there are also some pre-defined step types associated with replication


Figure 10-13: Sample information in the Edit Job Step window


Figure 10-14: Advanced tab of the New Job Step window

10 Scheduling Jobs

Figure 10-15: Schedules tab of the New Job Properties window

10 Scheduling Jobs

Figure 10-16: New Job Schedule window

10 Configuring Job Notifications

• The automation system powered by SQL Server Agent service keeps a log of all job and step history– This information can be helpful when debugging

jobs and when verifying that jobs have executed successfully

– In addition to this, various operators can be configured to receive notifications of jobs as they execute


Figure 10-17: Notification tab of the New Job Properties window


• From screen in Figure 10-17, you would typically assign various operators to receive information via e-mail, pager and NET SEND command– To send an e-mail notification to an operators, check

the E-mail operator option and then select an operator from the list box to the right

– The notification can be configured in three ways:• When the job fails• When the job succeeds• Every time the job executes regardless of success or failure

10 Creating Jobs with T-SQL Statements

• There is a set of system-stored procedures that can be used to create and manage jobs– They each address the various options available through the

Enterprise Manager user interface when creating new jobs

Table 10-2: Notify level values for sp_add_job system stored procedure

10 Creating Jobs with T-SQL Statements

• Adding Job Steps with T-SQL– The sp_add_jobstep system-stored procedure

is used to add steps to a job• Adding job schedules in T-SQL

– To add a job schedule to a job in T-SQL, use the sp_add_jobschedule system-stored procedure

10 Creating Alerts

• Alerts are used to respond to events as well as performance conditions

• You can define various alerts in the SQL Server Agent system to notify operators when particular events are written to the Windows application log

10 Creating Alerts

Figure 10-18: New Alert window

10 SQL Server Event Alerts

• SQL Server 2000 traps and reports certain events to the Windows application log– Each error that SQL Server 2000 reports is

stored in the sysmessages table of the master database

– By default there are over 3,700 different messages stored in this table• Each of these has a unique error number and a

severity level, as well as descriptive information


Table 10-3: SQL Server error security levels


Figure 10-19: Creating a SQL Server event alert


• Each alert can be configured to notify operators of the event using the Response tab of the New Alert Properties window

Figure 10-20: Notifications tab of the New Alert Properties window

10 Performance Condition Alerts

• Alerts can be configured to fire when a threshold on some performance metric is breached

• Performance counters– Individual metrics that are measured by SQL

Server 2000• Performance object

– Grouping mechanism used to categorize related performance counters

10 Performance Condition Alerts

Figure 10-21: Creating a SQL Server performance condition alert

10 Creating Alerts with T-SQL

• Alerts can also be created using the sp_add_alert system-stored procedure– As you would expect, only the parameters required

for a single type of alert are required when using the procedure

• Notifications are added to alerts using the sp_add_notification system-stored procedure

10 Windows Performance Monitor and SQL Server 2000

• When SQL Server 2000 is installed on Windows 2000 or a Windows NT server computer, several performance objects and their associate performance counters are installed

• These performance counters, as well as some native Windows 2000 performance objects and counters, are invaluable when determining where system bottlenecks occur

• The Windows System Monitor program is used to create traces and monitor specific counters


Figure 10-22: Windows System Monitor


Figure 10-23: Add Counter window of Windows System Monitor


Figure 10-24: Windows System Monitor tracking multiple counters

10 Monitoring for Bottlenecks with Windows System Monitor

• Windows System Monitor can be used to evaluate hardware conditions that affect the overall performance of SQL Server 2000

• There are three main categories of hardware resources that can commonly cause bottlenecks in server performance:– CPUs– Memory– I/O subsystem


• CPU– In large multi-user environments, CPU processing

power can be a limiting factor in overall performance– When determining if the CPU is causing a bottleneck

on a server, use the % Process Time performance counter from the Processor performance object in Windows System Monitor

– If the counter is consistently at 75% or higher, then the CPU is probably part of the cause in a poorly performing system


• Memory and Cache Hits– Amount of memory available to SQL Server 2000 is a

very important value when optimizing performance– To determine if there is a sufficient amount of memory

available and being used by a SQL Server 2000 instance, check the following counters:• Total Server Memory (KB) of the SQL Server:Memory Manager

performance object• Buffer Cache Hit Ration of the SQL Server:Buffer Management

performance object


• I/O subsystem– I/O subsystem performance bottlenecks are

directly related to capabilities of the hard drives on the server

– The important performance counters to watch when monitoring for a possible I/O subsystem bottleneck are found in the Logical Disk and Physical Disk performance objects


• The following performance counters of the Physical Disk object monitor disk latency:– Avg. Disk Sec/Transfer– Avg. Disk Sec/Read– Avg. Disk Sec/Write


Figure 10-25: Getting counter information using the Explain button

10 Chapter Summary

• SQL Server Agent service provides a robust and flexible facility for automating and monitoring SQL Server 2000 instances

• Using jobs, recurring operations can be configured and scheduled to run automatically by the SQL Server Agent service

• Alerts are a powerful component of the SQL Server Agent architecture that allow different events and performance conditions to trigger notifications to administrative personnel

10 Chapter Summary

• Alerts can be based on events that SQL Server 2000 writes to Windows application log or they can be defined for certain SQL Server 2000 performance counters

• Performance counters are added to the server when you install SQL Server 2000

• These counters can be used in conjunction with the Windows System Monitor to identify performance bottlenecks involving the CPU, memory and I/O subsystems

Documents

Chapter Ten