Monitoring Log Shipping

[dw001]

We have a few 2008R2 servers that are log shipping. At the surface we want to make sure the process is staying current. Does anyone have an example SQL query to setup a custom metric for this?

[chriskelly]

SQL Monitor comes with the Log backup overdue alert. You can configure the alert thresholds so that it will fire an alert when appropriate for your needs. For example, if you have a log backup running each 1/2 hour and normally takes 10 minutes to complete, then a threshold of 45 minutes would be reasonable.

Or are you looking for different information than this?
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Chris Kelly
Technical Support Engineer

[dw001]

That will address part of the need and I've implemented the specific alert.

The other half of this is when the logs are being shipped but not restored to the standby database. We had this situation occur where the log files got out of sequence and thus log shipping ceased. The primary server was still shipping but the secondary server was not restoring them.

We did see event log entries on the secondary server as follows:

System: Sql2
Name: Application
Type: Error
Source: MSSQLSERVER
EventID:
Details: The log shipping secondary database Sql2.MyDatabase has restore threshold of 45 minutes and is out of sync. No restore was performed for 1628 minutes. Restored latency is 2137 minutes. Check agent log and logshipping monitor information.

We can monitor these events using our other monitoring system but it would be really cool if we could see them in the SQL Monitor Overview/Alert pages.