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Improving Agent Alerts

Chris Bell has a way of making SQL Agent error messages a lot better:

Not very helpful. Sure, I know the job failed, and what step it failed on, but now I have to connect to the agent and look up the history to determine if this is something I have to worry about.

It would be nice to receive the details seen in the history of the job showing up in the email alert received.

Recently I have been working with systems that had all the alert on failure configured so we knew when things failed and could jump on re-running them if needed. We even had them showing up into a data team slack channel, so we had a history as well as notification to everyone on the team at the same time. The problem is that there were not any details in the alerts we received so we had to be able to connect and figure out what to do next or hope that our paid monitoring service would act on something after reading the details of the failure.

Chris has provided a script and gives some recommendations on jobĀ configuration which might reduce the number of alerts you get.