See how our SQL Server health check service can improve your database performance
Are you keeping up with the latest SQL Server health check rules?
Up until SQL Server 2012, Microsoft released versions of the SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer. This tool helped you identify potential issues with your SQL Server deployments. Since then, Microsoft stopped releasing the tool. So, they expect you to deploy Microsoft System Center Operations Manager with the SQL Server Management Pack to test database servers and databases for best practice rules.
For many organizations, additional investment in Microsoft System Center for managing databases is not cost-effective.
Instead, we see many of our customers run various scripts on a regular basis that test conditions that were known to be failure conditions based on prior service tickets. In many cases, the newer database administrators don’t even know what the script actually tests for.
Our SQL Server Health Check service addresses the following challenges that we hear from hundreds of our customers each year.
Option |
Challenge |
Benefit |
|---|---|---|
Following the best practices |
How can we be sure that we are following the best practices for SQL Server deployments? |
Our team of certified experts and professionals who manage thousands of SQL Server deployments from customers have built a knowledge base of hundreds of rules for versions of SQL Server 2000 through SQL Server 2017. We have incorporated these rules into our SQL Server health checks to provide reports with suggested remedies for your SQL Server deployments. |
Keeping your monitoring system up-to-date |
We currently have our own scripts and utilities to check for best practices, but it’s an ongoing challenge to maintain the list for new versions of SQL Server and event new infrastructures like running on Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud Platform. |
We keep up with all the latest best practices. We have many customers that trust us to provide 24×7 monitoring of their systems for on-premises and cloud deployments. So, we need to be current. |
Increasing the SQL Server database performance |
What if we experience performance issues with our data-driven applications? How to fix bottlenecks related to ETL jobs or BI reports? |
The typical reasons behind that include unoptimized queries, default configuration settings for your ever-growing database landscape, lack of indexes, many parallel queries, or even a weak database architecture. The ABCloudz experts have proven hands-on experience with optimizing complex SQL Server database systems and applications. After running the SQL Server performance check, our team provides you with a detailed performance report. We can prioritize these discovered issues and provide you with resources for their expert resolution. Our solution architects can go even further and come up with a modernization roadmap, which shows a path to move your system to the cloud. |
Addressing security issues and vulnerabilities |
How can we be sure that customer’s sensitive data is stored safely and according to the latest industry standards and compliance regulations? |
You can rely on ABCloudz certified professionals to run a rigorous security check, which will help discover the existing security vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and issues. By comparing your SQL Server settings and parameters to modern security best practices and standards, we provide your team with a comprehensive list of discovered issues. The trusted ABCloudz team can then address these issues or work with your database administrators or security officers to help fix them. Finally, you will be sure that both your SQL Server database and the applications store, transfer, and manage data according to the established organization’s security policies. |
Improving backup and failover strategy |
How can we test our database failover solution to understand how long it takes to restore the system after a failure? |
Our team of certified SQL Server professionals helped hundreds of our customers build SQL Server failover solutions. Over the years, we’ve established a proven approach, which allows for creating an exemplary failover solution without sacrificing the performance and without breaking your bank. And by running a SQL Server backup and disaster recovery check, we can optimize your backups, improve their reliability, and develop a more cost-effective solution. At the same time, our solution architects may design an alternative failover solution for you by leveraging the best cloud services. |
Getting started
We start by analyzing your database landscape using our automated SQL Server health check collector. For better results, we recommend long-term monitoring.
This collected data is stored in a local database and is available for the customer for audit. We then run the scripts, which check that your SQL Server database conforms to best practices and our established rules. After that, we provide you with automatically generated reports, which demonstrate the discovered issues.
Action plan and implementations
Our Certified SQL Server Health Check Solution Architects analyze and prioritize these issues and come up with an action plan on fixing them. This is a valuable result already, however, ABCloudz goes even further.
After discussing this plan with the customer, our team creates SQL scripts to fix these items. Then we can either provide your DBAs with these scripts or implement them using our manpower.
Results and benefits
Usually, at this point, our customers already experience a substantial application performance increase. However, we care about the net result of our optimization effort. So, we go all the way back to the discovery and analysis step.
We then provide customers with a report, which highlights all the fixed issues, and gives an overview of the issues still waiting to be fixed. Typically, SQL Server optimization is an ongoing process, which brings incremental improvements.
As a final destination, we may recommend moving your SQL Server workloads to the cloud to bring the performance of your applications to a whole new level.