Monitor an Enterprise of SQL Servers--Automating Management by Exception with Perl

Monitoring a large number of SQL Servers in an enterprise is a difficult task. The SQL Server administrators have to deal with a large amount of very dynamic and diverse information, and many other complicating factors. We found that the age-old principle of management by exception provides an effective framework in organizing our monitoring efforts. This paper describes our experience in using Perl to help automate the management-by-exception approach to monitoring SQL Servers. Perl is used, in most cases together with SQL, to collect and process SQL Server-related system information, to identify important exceptions, and to report them in a highly summarized fashion. The exception reports and a suite of Perl scripts developed to produce the reports are discussed. We conclude the paper by sharing some lessons learned in our struggle to tame SQL Server monitoring with Perl.