T-SQL Tuesday #186 Invitation - Managing Agent Jobs

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This month, I am hosting T-SQL Tuesday for the very first time. T-SQL Tuesday is a monthly blog party originally created by Adam Machanic in 2009 and currently curated by Steve Jones.

Each month, a new topic is chosen, published on the first Tuesday of the month and the following month, contributors post their own takes. Anyone can participate. Please publish your post by the end of Tuesday, May 13th in your timezone and on your platform of choice, then leave a comment below or tag me on Bluesky, Mastodon, or LinkedIn with a link to your post and I’ll include it in the roundup.

One of my favorite non-engine features of SQL Server is SQL Server Agent. It’s been around for a quarter of a century and while it would be wonderful to see some new features and revisions brought to it, it does its job well and keeps on truckin’ - even in Azure SQL Managed Instance. For this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, I’d like to know:

How do you manage and/or monitor your SQL Server Agent jobs?

This question is intentionally left open to interpretation as I’m hoping to get a variety of takes on it. There are a number of directions this can go, just off the top of my head:

  • Keeping job definitions in source control and deploying new/changed jobs from there
  • Who is responsible for Agent jobs
  • Monitoring and reporting on job success and failures, retries, and runtime performance (beyond the SSMS UI for Job History)
  • Packaging the tasks run from jobs in such a way that Agent is “just” a task scheduler
  • Setting up permissions and processes so that wide-reaching administrative permissions aren’t necessary to manage individual jobs
  • Keeping jobs, other Agent-related objects, and permissions in sync across clusters or your whole environment

These are just a few possible starting points, and certainly not an exhaustive list nor should you feel like you’re limited to choosing from them. Write about anything you like related to managing Agent jobs.

Again, please publish your post anytime between this going live and midnight (end of day) on Tuesday, May 13th and make sure it gets on my radar as described above, then I’ll get all the responses compiled into one post for everyone to check out.