Quick question to see if there is a better way to do this.
I have a backup maint plan set up on a SQL server - looks something like the image below...
As you can see - when the DB backups fail - I get an email to the helpdesk stating that they failed.
I was working on the server today and wanted to double check to make sure backups where working for a DB and saw that no DB's had been backed up in almost 6 months (WHOOPS!).
When I checked the logs as to why - the error was
"the job failed. unable to determine if the owner of job has server access."
I believe that this was because the user that created the job moved on and his user account was deleted. Unfortunately - because the job never ran, the notification didnt work either. So much for alerting when a job fails! I was able to fix by setting the job owner to SA (not sure if this is a best practice or not?)
So my question is - whats a better way to monitor backup jobs, maint plans etc to make sure that they are running. Please dont state the obvious - "Check them frequently manually" - in this day and age - reliable monitoring, alerting should be available. Is there a better way to write this job to alert on failure, or is there an event in the eventlog viewer I can look for and alert on via splunk?
Appreciate the advice in advance.