Alerting is like a nice fun game of BINGO.  When a new ball is pulled and the announcer yells out “Under the B… 6″ if everyone stood up at the same time and yelled “NO BINGO” and the one person who needed B6 yells out “BINGO” chances are you’d probably miss the winner.  There is a reason that only the winner stands up and yells “BINGO” and that is so the game can stop and the person can be easily identified as needing attention.

When you’re setting up your notifications and alerts you need to stop and think about what you’re really trying to accomplish in doing so.  The same type of mentality should be used if you use 3rd party software for monitoring/alerting/etc.  Your first instict might be to turn EVERYTHING on and it’s not long before you realize that all this is going to do is generate a HUGE amount of spam and white noise and chances are you’ll miss your “BINGO winner” who actually requires some attention.

Q:  How do you eat an elephant?   A:  One bite at a time.

This is a great way to look at notifications… start small and take little bites.  Once you’re comfortable with the information you’re receiving take another bite, and another bite and eventually you’ll find your sweet spot where you’re getting the information/notifications you want without the additional white noise/spam you don’t.

Enjoy!!

So I’m finishing up building a shiney new SQL Server 2005 Instance and I start configuring Database Mail.  Everything is going fine and once it’s setup I do a “Send Test Email”.   I get the email in a couple seconds so for my final test I create a dummy job (Select getdate() or something like that) and on the notifications tab I set it to email me when the job completes.

I kick off my job… nothing… weird.  I try again… nothing. 

It’s getting later in the day so I figured that I fat-fingered the setup… so I go through and do it again… same test and same results.

Sadly enough it took me 2 Database Mail reconfigures before I remembered that in order for the SQL Server Agent to use Database Mail that it needs to be configured to do so. 

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that restarting the SQL Server Agent Service is required before the changes take effect.  Thanks Eric!!!

*sigh* Time to step away from the keyboard for a while LOL… is it 5:00 yet?  I’m sure it is SOMEWHERE!!

Enjoy!!

Is that too much to ask?

The same idea can be said about working in a database evironment (or any IT environment for that matter) where many people have access to do things that affect your world.  I understand that you

(DISCLAIMER:  strictly a hypothetical “you”.  “You” is not directed at anyone at the present time rather it’s the “you” from situations I’ve experienced in the past)

…have a task assigned to you and you need to get this done… I get that 100% no problem… but just as a common courtesy could you give a guy a “wave” if you know you’re going to need to either “bend the rules” temporarily or restart an instance or do anything that might have a cascading effect to either myself or others?

Communication is not a sexy “buzz word” that is a passing fancy, rather it’s something that has been around since the beginning of time.

Just think what could of been avoided if Adam and Eve would of given God a little “heads up” that they were gonna sample some forbidden fruit and just wanted to make sure he was cool with the idea.

(DISCLAIMER: I am not trying to insinuate that DBAs are Gods or THE GOD or have any devine powers whatsoever.  Further more I’m not saying that anyone who is NOT a DBA is evil by nature and should be punished and banished from the great database Garden of Eden)

Enjoy!!

So I decided to poke around the managment studio a bit and under Tools -> Options if you select Query Results there is a checkbox for playing the default beep when a query batch completes.

Who knew? I didn’t LOL

Granted this doesn’t give you the option to attach your own sound… but I imagine there are some smart folks out there that would be able to “hack-fu” something if needed hehehe

Enjoy!!

Ever get this message? I did and it took me a couple minutes to remember how to resolve it so I thought I would post about it just in case I’m not the only one LOL.

I first decided to “right click” on the Database Mail object under the management folder and selected “Send Test Email” I entered my email address and sent the email 1/2 expecting not to get it but my blackberry vibrated and the familar “Notifier_ChiGong”sounded.

So I’m getting mail directly from the Database Mail service but SQL Server Agent is not able to send… then the lightbulb went off and I remembered that you need to go to the properties of SQL Server Agent and under the Alert System page you need to enable the Mail Profile for SQL Server Agent. (don’t forget to restart SQL Server Agent for the changes to take effect)

I felt like a “newb” on that one but I’ve never been ashamed of making my forgetfulness and embarrassments public. So yeah I’ll take one for the team and if you “googled” this problem and came to this page don’t worry I wont tell anyone. LOL

Enjoy!!

Just for fun I went to this page and posted a test comment and to my suprise (and disappointment) I didn’t receive an email notification from this site either. *sigh*.  So because I know the first thing GoDaddy is going to ask me to do is uninstall/reinstall I did that on EDMPASS.com (hense the nice default wordpress installation page that’s there right now).  So no plugins, no themes, no nothing (yes I said no nothing… get over it) and I posted a comment and yeah… base install, no changes/customizations of anykind and no email comment notifications.

Just to make sure I checked my “discussion” settings and …

as expected and configured but just not working

So I emailed GoDaddy:

Customer Inquiry

Name : Colin Stasiuk Phone : Domain Name : edmpass.com Browser Info : Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30428; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; MS-RTC LM

Other : WordPress 2.7.0

Base install… no widgets, plugins, etc added.

Not receiving comment notifications via email.

Please let me know what is required to make this work. (receive email on comments is checked to true)

And as I expected I got the:

Dear Colin Stasiuk,

Thank you for contacting Online Support.
 
I understand you have a question about comment notifications that you are not receiving from WordPress. Please uninstall and reinstall the blog software to insure that no files were corrupted in the original install process.  I have included instructions to do so:

(don’t worry I wont paste the whole thing)

So I figured HEY… I’ll play the game and uninstall/reinstall AGAIN and comment email notifications again did not work.

So I’m replying to the incident with the following:

P.S. I will write a glowing review of GoDaddy if I don’t have to wait 24 hours again before someone gets back to me.  It will be even more glowing if they can actually help resolve my problem