In the last days I needed a quick and efficient way to monitor the performance of a job and of each step over time. There’s a lot of interesting data in MSDB database and the various sysjob tables, but the stored data is not really easy to use outside the Management Studio. Date and Time are not stored as date/time data type, there is no easy way to correlate the performance of a step with the related job execution (for example is not that easy to return all the steps of a job executed, say, yesterday at 10:00).
So I decided to write some views to make the querying easier and then the next move was to create a Tabular Model with Power Pivot on Excel to make also analysis easier.
Since this is a somehow recurring task that I find myself doing during my job – not often, but when I have to do it now I have something much more powerful in my hands – I decided to put it also con CodePlex so that that little work can be shared with the community.
You can find the scripts with the objects (3 UDFs and 4 Views) that must be created inside MSDB and the Power Pivot Excel 2010 model here:
http://jobmonitor.codeplex.com/
Enjoy!