As you probably know, SqlBak recently announced the Server Health Check feature that adds significant value to SqlBak as a database backup service, allowing it to monitor the vital parameters of your server, such as database size, transaction log size, index fragmentation level, free disk space, and folder size.
This feature is loved by many system and database administrators since it allows them to shift the burden of tracking these critical indicators to the service, freeing their minds for other crucial tasks.
But you may ask: How does this health check affect the performance of my server?
To answer this question let’s look into the details of what types of server monitoring takes place here.
Server down alerts
The availability check is performed with a 5 min interval on the Professional plan, 10 min on Standard and 60 min on the Free plan. This test simply checks that your server is alive and reachable, and it brings almost zero additional load to the server.
Server health check
The health and performance of your DBMS are checked once an hour by running several simple SQL queries requesting multiple parameters on every database from the server. It also doesn’t load your server significantly since a database server is able to process thousands of such operations per second. The Server Health Check is an optional feature available in the Professional plan only, and it is set to Off by default.
Folder size monitoring
When you enable the Server Health Check, SqlBak also collects folder sizes on your server, giving you an opportunity to deal with the no-free-disk-space problem quickly.
You should also not worry about any drop in performance as this process runs in the background with the lowest priority among other main processes in Windows. This means that when the system is idle, it can give more attention to updating folder size information, but when you run any other crucial processes, this task will pause or will be executed with minimal system load.
Note that the folder sizes are updated once daily, so the information you see on your monitoring page may be up to one day old.
Summary
The SQL Server Health Check performed by SqlBak has been designed to have little impact on your server performance and can be used in any production environment.