Fixed price
SQL Server Health Check: three days, one report, no surprises
The first thing I do on almost every new estate. Configuration, backups, security, performance and availability checked against what I have seen go wrong in more than thirty years, written up in priority order with an effort estimate per finding.
What gets checked
Twelve areas, every instance
- Instance and database configuration against best practice for your version and workload
- Backup strategy, retention and an actual restore test of a production database
- Recovery models, log growth, virtual log file counts, autogrowth settings
- Security: logins, roles, sysadmin members, orphaned users, patch level, surface area
- Wait statistics and the top resource-consuming queries from Query Store or the plan cache
- Index health: missing, unused, duplicate and fragmented indexes; statistics freshness
- tempdb, memory, MAXDOP, cost threshold for parallelism, I/O latency per file
- SQL Agent jobs, failures, maintenance plans and what they actually do at night
- High availability configuration and failover readiness, where present
- Capacity: growth trend and headroom for the next twelve months
- Error log and system health session review for the last weeks
- Edition and licensing sanity check: features you pay for and do not use, or the reverse
What you receive
A report your team can execute, not a slide deck
- A written report (PDF) with findings in three tiers: critical, important, advisable
- An effort estimate per finding, so the fixes can be budgeted and scheduled
- A one-hour walkthrough with your team, on Teams or on-site
- Quick wins applied on the spot where you allow it, each with a logged change and rollback
- A baseline you can compare against after the fixes, and next year
Three days
How the days are spent
Intake and access
A short call with your IT lead, the inventory, read-only access over your VPN or a screen share. Data collection scripts run during the day, without impact.
Analysis
Every instance against the twelve areas. Restore test, wait-stats baseline, index and query analysis. Questions to your team where the history matters.
Report and walkthrough
Findings written up in priority order with effort estimates. One hour with your team to walk through it and agree what happens next, if anything.
Questions
About the health check
Does it disrupt production?
No. The analysis reads dynamic management views, Query Store, msdb and the error log, which is what monitoring tools do all day. The restore test runs on a separate server or a non-production instance you designate.
Remote or on-site?
Either. Most health checks are done remotely over a VPN or a screen-shared session, with the walkthrough on Teams. In the Netherlands and Belgium I am happy to do the intake and the walkthrough on-site.
What happens after the report?
That is your call. Some teams execute the findings themselves with the report as a work list. Others ask me to do the critical tier, or to take the estate on retainer. If you engage me for follow-up work, the health check fee is credited against it.
Why a fixed price?
Because the first step should be easy to approve. You know the cost, the duration and what you get before you say yes, and you decide about everything after it with the report in hand.
Fixed price, no surprises
Three days. One report. Then you decide.
Book the intake call and I will confirm the dates within one business day.