Automation Basics with Powershell and CMS

by Mark Wilkinson · September 12, 2017

As a DBA I use PowerShell every day. If it can be automated, I will automate it. In my environment I have 300+ instances to keep track of and maintain. When you manage that many instances, it’s important to have a “source of truth” for a full list of your instances. This is where Central Management Server (CMS) comes in. The combination of PowerShell and CMS is a powerful one. In this post we’ll explore a PowerShell function I wrote to retrieve servers from my CMS server.

Handling SQL Agent Job Failures

by Mark Wilkinson · August 30, 2017

Hopefully you don’t experience a lot of job failures. But when multiple high-frequency jobs start failing, your inbox can get overloaded. Besides being annoying, an inbox full of job failure emails can make it hard to sift out the signal from the noise. In this post we’ll walk through a system that I have used to monitor job failures on 100’s of instances running 150+ jobs a piece, many of which run every 5 minutes.