Doing More With Less… Policy Based Management

Session Abstract:

Do more with less… sound familiar? In this introduction to Policy Based Management presentation we will be going over what Policy Based Management is and how to use Policy Based Management and a Central Management Server to evaluate your daily, weekly, and monthly checklists against your entire SQL Server farm.  We will be reviewing some of the “out of the box” policies as well as creating some custom policies that you might be interested in evaluating against your SQL Server farm. Finally we will be taking a quick look at how to tie all of this together with the Enterprise Policy Management Framework (available on codeplex).

I would love to do this (or another) presentation topic for YOUR PASS Chapter as well… so if you’re a chapter leader or a chapter member who is interested in this (or a different) session topic and are willing to do a remote session please let me know and we’ll work on scheduling a date.  I can do either a 30 minute “Short Presentation” or a 60 minute “Feature Presentation”

Thanks!

If you’d like to chat with me about this or anything else (SQL or other) please leave a comment or hit me up on my Twitter: @ColinStasiuk

Deep huh?

Well if the job actually does something important of course it will get noticed. 

So the bigger question is:

What can you do to make sure that YOU know about it before anyone else does? 

Cause who likes surprise phone calls?

This is a multipart-answer so bare with me…

Step 1.  Setup a Policy Based Management condition to find SQL Server Agent Jobs with NO notification on Failure

DOWNLOAD CONDITION

Step 2.  Setup a Policy Based Management policy to check the condition created in Step 1

DOWNLOAD POLICY

OK so this will do nothing more then tell you whether or not the SQL Server you are evaluating this policy against has jobs that do not have a notification on failure configured. 

What if my SQL Server Agent has 500 jobs? How do I find the ones without failure notifications configured?

Step 3. 

SELECT * 
FROM msdb.dbo.sysjobs 
WHERE [enabled] = 1 AND notify_level_email NOT IN (1,2,3)

Fantastic so what if you have 500 jobs and 499 of these jobs DO NOT have any notification on failure configured?

Step4.  Script to update all jobs to include a notification on failure

*** MAKE SURE YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT THIS IS DOING BEFORE RUNNING THE OUTPUT ***

What this script will do is provide you with the commands to update ALL your jobs to notify BY EMAIL to the operator you provide in the @NotifyOperator variable

USE [msdb] 
DECLARE @NotifyOperator nvarchar(100) 
SELECT @NotifyOperator = 'DBA' 
SELECT 'EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_update_job @job_id=N''' + convert(nvarchar(50),job_id) + ''', @notify_level_email=2, @notify_email_operator_name=N''' + @NotifyOperator + '''' FROM msdb.dbo.sysjobs

Tweak this as you see fit:

• Include a WHERE clause to exclude or include only certain jobs
• Change additional notification options (page? net send? etc?)

 So there you go… you now have:

• A check condition and policy to identify jobs that DO NOT have some level of notification
• A script to identify which jobs those are
• A script to blanket update all jobs to a particular notification level and settings.

Enjoy!! (Follow me on Twitter: @ColinStasiuk)

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/623637316

Date: May 26th 2010
Time: 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm
Location: Stanley A. Milner library
Map: 7 Sir Winston Churchill Square
Meeting Room: Centennial Room – BASEMENT
Speaker: Colin Stasiuk
Topic: Policy Based Management… not JUST for SQL Server 2008

Session Abstract:

Policy Based Management… not JUST for SQL Server 2008

Colin Stasiuk is an MCP, MCTS SQL 2005/2008, MCITP DBDEV, and MCITP DBA. Currently, he is an independent consultant contracted to Vantix Systems and working for the Government of Alberta.

Colin is an accomplished Microsoft SQL Server DBA who has been working with SQL Server since 1996. He is the founder of Benchmark IT Consulting and is always willing to lend a hand with questions in many SQL Server community forums and via Twitter (http://twitter.com/BenchmarkIT) . His specialties include SQL Server Administration, Performance Tuning, Security, Monitoring, Best Practice / Standards, Upgrades, and Consolidation.

Colin is a proud PASS member, President of EDMPASS, and has recently co-authored a book on SQL Server 2008 Policy Based Management.

Agenda:
5:00 pm – Pizza and Socializing
5:30 pm – Sponsor Presentation
5:45 pm – Feature Presentation
7:00 pm – Wrap Up and Draws

If you haven’t signed up already at EDMPASS.com please do so now to receive meeting notifications, news, and updates from EDMPASS.

Hope to see you there.

Enjoy!!

My lovely wife Heather gave me a call and said… “Guess what I have in my hands?”  I had heard that Ken and Jorge received their author copies this week so I was very quick to guess it right

Can’t wait to get home today and check it out… I have all the pdf page proofs for all the chapters but it just isn’t the same LOL

By request I’ll be doing a blog in the next day or so about the whole book writing experience as it was probably one of the most challenging yet rewarding experiences in my career.

(Big thanks to wifey for taking a pic!!)

Enjoy!!

After going through this process I have a whole new respect for anyone who takes on the challenge of writing a book.  It is a long and painful process that will eat up any and all free time that you have but it is probably one of the most rewarding challenges that I’ve taken on and I can’t wait to get my own “AUTHORS COPIES” box in the mail (great post/video BTW Tom)

2 books that are on my “must read” list now that I’m going to have more free time are:

SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting and DBA Survivor

Brent and Tom both have always been great resources to help troubleshoot, bounce ideas off of, and just always willing to lend a hand in anything I’ve sent their way and I’m quite interested to give their books a read and a review.  Tom is the technical editor for my book and although he never really explained what he meant by “punch harder” I think/hope I got the idea LOL.

I’ll admit that I haven’t picked up a book since starting this whole co-authoring a book started back in September/09.  So I thought these two books would be a great place to start getting back into reading because the authors have both helped shape and guide my SQL path greatly over the last year or two.

So here’s to getting back into reading, blogging more often, and just generally getting back in touch with the world LOL

Enjoy!!

January is going to be a VERY busy month for me both personally and professionally so I thought I would write a quick blog post just so people don’t think I’ve fallen off the face of the earth or something LOL   The biggest and challenging task at hand is I need to have the first draft of my final 2 chapters done by February 1st.  While I’m not concerned too much about making this deadline I’m doing my best to make sure I don’t make the same mistakes I made in my first chapter with these final 2 chapters.

The second thing on my “hit list” for January is the EDMPASS meeting on January 27th with Buck Woody.  This will be the first time that I’m going to make the meeting “public” via Live Meeting and also going to work with recording it and making it available after the fact as well.

A couple personal items are next for me as I’m leaving on a jet plane on January 20th to go to Las Vegas to play in a Ball Hockey tournament called “The Sin City Shootout”.  I didn’t take any time off during the holidays as I was covering for alot of people that did so this will be a nice little break and alot of fun if only for 5 days.  From my previous trips to Vegas 5 days is pretty well the max for me cause (for me anyways) Vegas after 5 days is just annoying.

And finally I hope to make a trip somewhere in there for the weekend up to Cold Lake (about 3 hours NE of Edmonton) to see my sister, brother-in-law, niece, and new baby niece Ella.  I’ve seen pictures and videos but I can’t wait to get up there and spend some QT with the new little addition to my sister’s family.

I hope everyone is doing well and sorry for being a bit out of touch (via MSN, Twitter, etc)

Enjoy!!

Have  I mentioned how much I love the SQL community….

Hey… have you heard that Jonathan Kehayis wrote a blog post about some uses for DBINFO and the dbi_version and dbi_createVersion values?

Yeah but did you hear that Paul Randal wrote a blog post about Checking if Data Purity check will be run based off of the dbi_createVersion ?

Yeah but did you hear that Sankar Reddy wrote a blog post about pulling the dbi_createVersion, dbi_version, and dbi_crdate for all databases in a single script?

Yeah but did you hear that Ken Simmons wrote a blog post about checking every databases data purity flag and identifying which databases will not perform the data purity check?

Like I said… I love the community… a single persons blog post spawns multiple variations and building of ideas and thoughts… and even though each persons blog post is different then the rest each author makes sure to call out the others posts as excellent related reading and “inspiration” for their post.

Hey… did you hear that Colin Stasiuk (thanks to an idea and email request from Ken Simmons ) added a Policy Based Management Check Condition and Policy to check every database’s data purity check value in his environment…

CONDITION

Download .sql file: DataPurityFlag_Cdn

POLICY

Download .sql file: DataPurityFlag_Ply

(Yeah I know I said I’d do a non-PBM post this time around but it wasn’t TOTALLY my fault hehehe )

Enjoy!!

Translation: Fail Whale for SQL Server Management Studio and Central Management Server for Policy Based Managment using PowerShell…. lol simple eh?

So this is a Microsoft Connect Item in the making…

I had created a PowerShell script to run a bunch of policies against a list of servers that I defined in a ServerList.txt file.  I decided that I didn’t like the idea of needing to maintain a text file and instead of storing the Instance Names in a table somewhere I decided to hook into the Central Managment Server.

So I logged into the server that is currently running the SQL Server Agent job that was doing all this using a ServerList.txt file.  I changed the PowerShell Script to point to my CMS server instead and ran the .ps1 directly on the server using “sqlps F:\PBM\EvaluatePolicies.ps1″.  The script ran as expected, used my CMS server, and everything was tickidyboo.  Or so I thought….

I decided to do my final check and run the SQL Server Agent job itself… and it failed.

Hmmmm that’s weird… so I confirmed that the SQL Server Agent account had access to the CMS server and even granted it explicit sysadmin rights (just for my troubleshooting).

FAIL

I started tweeting about the problem and got some immediate advice from @afernandez, @russjohnson, @wendy_dance, and @SQLChicken.  While none of the advice solved my problem it was great to have some other “eyes” reading my problem and confirming the stuff that I had already thought of and tested.

The SQL Server Agent Service Account is a secure account that I don’t even have access or the password for so I asked for some help from one of our Server Admins for my troubleshooting… he logged into the server for me and I tried to run the ps1 file….

FAIL

So I opened up SSMS and checked if I could connect to the CMS directly….

SOLUTION:  In order to use a PowerShell script to connect to the Central Management Server using the SQL Server Agent the service account that SQL Server Agent is running under must REGISTER the CMS Server through SSMS on the Server that is running the job.

Did you get all that…. because I had never Remote Desktopped onto the Server using the SQL Server Agent service account and Registered the CMS Server in SSMS using that account when I tried to access the CMS Server through my PowerShell script it failed.

I registered the CMS Server using the SQL Server Agent Service Account and everything started sizzling like bacon on a hot pan.

Enjoy!!

If you’ve never watched Stuart from MadTV the Title of this blog post will probably be lost on you but if you want to get up to speed just Watch This Video on YouTube

So if you read my blog (first thanks!! ) you know that I’ve been having a love affair lately with Policy Based Management.  I’m starting to look outside of the canned Policies and working on creating my own.  I wanted to start simple just to get something going so I came up with an idea for a policy:

Jobs That Do Not Have Email Operator On Failure Enabled

So first I created my Condition:

• Name: SQLAgentJobsWithNoNotificationOnFailure
• Facet: Server (I picked server because the query I’m going to be only needs to be ran once vs msdb)

I built my SQL Statement:

SELECT	COUNT(*)
FROM	msdb.dbo.sysjobs
WHERE	[enabled]  = 1 AND
		notify_level_email != 2

and went to add it to the “Field” column of my condition but I remembered the Podcast by Brent Ozar and Thomas LaRock where they demoed the ExecuteSQL() function within Policy Based Management.

So my code in my field column ended up looking like this instead:

EXECUTESQL('numeric', 'SELECT	COUNT(*)
FROM	msdb.dbo.sysjobs
WHERE	name NOT LIKE ''%TestDatabaseMail%'' AND
		[enabled]  = 1 AND
		notify_level_email != 2')

 So then I populated the expected value….   = 0 and I was ready to go.

I next created my Policy using my new Check condition and voila, I just built my first custom Policy.  I evaluated the Policy and saw immediate value as there were a couple production jobs that did NOT have any email notification set on failure.

My love affair with Policy Based Management continues… I think I’m ready to commit and start picking out china together.

Happy Friday!!!

P.S. Already working on v.2 of the policy… I want to be able to filter particular jobs as well as return the list of non conforming jobs stay tuned LOL

Enjoy!!

OK so the last time I handed out a SQL Bacon Nugget of Excellence Award was July 8th for @SQLAgentMan ‘s article on Determining Free Space, Consumed Space, and Total Space Allocated for Microsoft SQL Server Databases

and this time around @SQLGal has put something together that can only be described as a SQL Bacon Nugget of Excellence.  So a little background story on this one… I’ve been doing more with Policy Based Management lately and coincidently more with PowerShell as well.  So I started playing around with having an automated policy checker run in the night via PowerShell and email me the “non conformists”

I was almost done my initial release when I all of a sudden found that if I ran the powershell script from the server directly that I couldn’t connect to some of my servers (SQL 2000).  I re-ran… nothing… tried a few different ideas… no dice.  So as I like to do from time to time if my “googling” doesn’t help much is I posed the question to the Twitterverse.

As always (cause Twitter is just great for community support) I got a couple replies and offers of assistance.  One reply was from @Timbo_B_Edwards.  His tweet pointed me to a site that suprisingly (with my googling on Policy Based Management and Powershell) I didn’t find before.

Enterprise Policy Management Framework

This offering from @SQLGal puts my ragamuffin first attempt at Policy Based Management via Powershell to shame.

The Enterprise Policy Managment Framework uses PowerShell to evaluate policies against your SQL Server Environment, shreds the XML for you, and then renders and delivers your policy history reports via Reporting Services.

So for the love of all things good and pure in this world… if you have SQL Server 2008 (and if you don’t this is one heck of a good reason to start) this is something you HAVE TO check out and spend some quality time with. 

Lara Rubbelke

• Laura on SQLBlog.com
• @SQLGal on Twitter
• Enterprise Policy Management Framework

P.S. I found the solution to my problem on the top of the Enterprise Policy Management Framework page…

“Update on SP1: You must install SQL Server 2008 SP1 Cumulative Update 3 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971491) if you have installed SP1 on the Central Management Server. SP1 Cumulative Update 3 will fix the SP1 bug which prevented down version policy evaluation.”

Enjoy!!