How Do You Track System Dependencies?
This makes perfect sense!
Today’s blog post is more of a question to generate some discussion and maybe, collectively, some ideas around how to track system dependencies. When I say “system dependencies”, I mean the components that are dependent on each other in your enterprise data infrastructure. For example, how do you keep track of the fact that Database A is dependent on SQL Server instance A, which in turn is dependent Server A, which may or not be a physical server and, if not, then is dependent on Virtual Host A. And then going from the database out, what application(s) are dependent on Database A, what web servers or application servers are they dependent on and what is the criticality of those applications to the enterprise. Additionally, reports and/or cubes could be dependent on Database A and those all have their own dependencies as well and so on.
I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on this subject and how you are tackling this issue within your organization.
Tweets that mention How Do You Track System Dependencies? - SQLServerTimes2 -- Topsy.com
October 2nd, 2009 at 9:20 am #
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by loriedwards and loriedwards. loriedwards said: RT @timbo_b_edwards: New blog post: http://bit.ly/Z7Vc6 "How Do You Track System Dependencies?" [...]
Jorge Segarra
October 2nd, 2009 at 9:22 am #
Chad Miller (@cmille19) demoed a REALLY cool dependency tool with PowerShell. It visually shows you what has dependency on what, for free!
Chuck Lathrope
October 2nd, 2009 at 9:52 am #
We do it manually. I have a proc that searches for text in our objects and jobs and returns them. I then run this with a tool that hits all of our servers. I also have all objects in TFS that I can query also with regex enabled tools.
The guys at http://www.apexsql.com have the best application that I have tested for dependency mapping (goes way beyond anything I have seen yet, they have good explanation of what they do on their site).
I have been dying to find a tool that could link webcode with db code and have it hit linked servers to. If I had the skills and time, I would write it myself and have a great business just doing that.
Wendy
October 2nd, 2009 at 9:57 am #
This is pretty lame, but a former company had a list of applications and all the servers which it touched. That was about as close as it got. Yeah, an Excel file….
Tim & Lori
October 2nd, 2009 at 10:13 am #
Thanks for the responses, everyone! This is like the holy grail of dbas…