Spring cleaning health check special offer in May

Spring takes a while to get going in the Pacific Northwest but spring is definitely in the air now that it's May – and spring means spring cleaning!

It's been about 18 months since we last ran a special pricing offer so I've decided to offer one through the month of May for new customers: a 6-hour SQL Server health check for US$1300 (a 1/3 price saving).

The US$1300 special offer is for a 6-hour health check of a single SQL Server instance (SQL Server 2005 or higher) and you can be anywhere in the world.

For a typical SQL Server Health Check we ask you to download a customized SQLDiag package to run from an FTP site we provide to you. The scripts gather information on more than 100 areas such as:

  • Wait statistics
  • IO statistics
  • Memory configuration
  • Buffer pool usage
  • Server configuration
  • Databases configuration
  • Backup information
  • Information from the query plan cache

We also provide you with a questionnaire which asks about your maintenance practices and I/O subsystem configuration.
 
The collection utility, SQLDiag, ships with SQL Server and is a tool that Microsoft Product Support uses to run data-collecting scripts. Our scripts should take only a few minutes to run and will output several text files to a SQLDiagOutput directory where you unzipped the package to. You can see what data we're collecting as everything is output as plain text. We then ask you to upload the completed questionnaire and output files to the same FTP site.  Once we have the data we will review all of the information and generate the report for your environment.  For regular health checks we can also add in data gathering questionnaires/SQLDiag packages regarding virtualization, clustering, your HA/DR strategy, and indexing configuration if desired, but the special offer doesn't cover time for those.
 
The majority of clients on our
Past Clients page have gone through this process with one or more servers – so we have plenty of references available, including US government if required.

Typically we like to start out performance tuning engagements with an initial health check of the environment, which provides a comprehensive review of the configuration of the server to isolate any problems that exist in the environment.  This has proven to provide most clients with the best return on their investment time-wise since we methodically review over 100 different items that are important for SQL Server performance and availability.  Based on the outcome of the health check, we provide you with a detailed report of the problem areas that includes supporting links to blog posts and articles that we and others have written that provide details about how you can fix the problems.  Alternatively, we can also assist you with remediation of the identified problems on a WebEx session – most customers do the latter or opt for our Remote DBA service to provide ongoing support.

All you have to do is send me an email before June to qualify for the special rate and we can get started.

We look forward to hearing from you, and to helping your SQL Servers get healthy!

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