It’s important to always keep an eye out on your database servers. Some database servers might need more of your attention and upkeep than others, of course, but after all, even if they are facing some sorts of issues, none of them should be neglected.
When your database instances are facing issues, one of the things you might want to keep an eye out on is SQL Server uptime.
Sometimes, your database instances might also need to be restarted. An out-of-focus screen calculating sql-server uptime. As easy as it sounds, the restarting of your database instances might be a pretty tedious task: you might need to shut down all of the running processes, keep an eye out on your database schemas, and also keep an eye out on their uptime – thankfully, we have tools that can help us with that.
dbWatch for Improving SQL Server Uptime
dbWatch, for example, is a fully-fledged database management solution letting you keep an eye on all kinds of database instances: from Oracle and Sybase to PostgreSQL.
However, what we’re interested in the most is the capabilities dbWatch provides for Microsoft SQL server (MSSQL) to successfully run. If you’re using SQL Server Express, you will be able to make use of dbWatch as well!
Open up dbWatch and import a SQL Server instance (in this example we will use SQL Server 2017) – you will see a bunch of “Folders.”) Those folders house categories of database jobs – database jobs that can help you monitor your database availability, capacity, replication capabilities, maintenance, or performance:
In this case, you might have noticed that we marked a job called “Database Server uptime” – check what it says and you will notice that it depicts the amount of time your SQL Server has been running:
When to Restart SQL Server Instances
Seeing this shouldn’t be surprising – however, when do you decide when it’s time to restart your SQL Server instances?
In that kind of scenario, we would need to take care of a few aspects. We should think about:
- Do we need to restart our SQL Server instances in the first place? Perhaps we could do without a restart and change a couple of queries around here and there?
- When should we restart our SQL Server instances (i.e., what kind of restart time would be most beneficial for both of us and not interrupt the work for our clients, employees, etc.?)
- How should we restart our database (SQL Server) instances? Manually? Should we use the help of specific tools (e.g. dbWatch, etc.)?How should we use such tools to our advantage?
Solve SQL Server Issues
Answering these three questions shouldn’t be too difficult – however, what might be more difficult is the fact that,even if you restart your database (in this case, SQL Server) instances while aiming to solve some kind of an issue you are facing, you might find that you might have the need to keep an eye on a couple of different things related to your database instances ranging from availability to maintenance at the same time as well.
How Monitoring Can Help You
Probably, you should use software that is up for the task, such as dbWatch. For example, expand the Performance section of database jobs in dbWatch and you will see a couple of different jobs that will be suitable to improve your database performance – dbWatch in this case can monitor your databases for high activity (which might be useful to decide when to restart your database instances – you should do so at the lowest point of usage to not disrupt anybody using your services):
dbWatch can also provide you with the statistics of the usage of your indexes inside of a certain database instance, etc.:
Deciding your Next Steps
However, that’s only when performance is related. dbWatch also has other similar MS SQL database jobs (simply expand the categories of Availability, Capacity, and the like), and it can also show you a bunch of really colourful statistics to help you decide what should the next step be for your database instances (simply click Monitor -> Management to observe the following screen):
Screen shot showing instance information regarding SQL instances.
This output might also be helpful when deciding when to restart your SQL Server database instances. You should restart your database instances once they are at the lowest point of usage (for that, you could use the logical reads per second and the sessions graphs.)
Conclusion on Improving SQL Server Uptime with Restarts
We hope this blog post has been a little eye-opener of what restarting SQL Servers and other database instances usually comes down to.
Interested in trying dbWatch to help with SQL Server management? Try it for 90 days for free.
