The Importance of a Database State of Health Check

Knowledge is power and proactively determining what’s causing problems in your system is integral to keeping your system functioning and keeping you in the driver’s seat. There are many reasons to perform a State of Health check, including:

• A Departure: Staff departs and takes key environmental knowledge with them.

• New Management or Staff: A "changing of the guard" occurs when management or new staff is added and you need to quickly collect and provide cross-environment information.

• A Fresh Perspective on Stubborn Issues: Since there are multiple ways to solve a problem, a fresh perspective might bring new information to the table for remediating a stubborn issue, or proactively uncovering a hidden issue.

• Potential Costs: Mismanaged data can cost - both in terms of productivity, revenue, and for audits.

It is possible to conduct a State of Health on your own, but it’s difficult, time-consuming, and hard to know what the next steps to take are.

Aspect Consulting, Inc's State of Health Check provides an in-depth audit of SQL Server databases across your entire environment. The State of Health Check includes a State of Health Scorecard, which summaries several key factors in your database in an easy to read format.

Aspect’s State of Health Check includes over 75+ audit checks across 5 categories:

• Backup and Recovery - assesses whether backup type and frequency meet best practices and your RTO/RPO expectations

• Performance - checks assess whether CPU, memory, disk space, allocation & consumption fall within acceptable ranges, and whether indexing opportunities exist for performance improvement

• Security - gathers role memberships and permissions for review, and identify settings that fall outside of best practices

• Configuration - gathers configuration settings that fall outside of best practices for review and remediation

• Jobs & Notifications - gathers alerts, job ownership & status info for review, and email & notification configuration for assessment.

In addition to the scorecard, Aspect also provides a more in-depth report with detailed results organized by severity (Critical, Medium, and Longer-term issues), which give technical stakeholders an idea of the scope and planning needed to optimize your organization going forward. 

If you’re interested in more database services to benefit your business, check out the rest of Aspect’s portfolio here.