EOL Asset DB – databases

The IT Assets Database was replaced by the IT Admins CMDB and is EOL / End of Life, no further development will be done on this project.

Databases – they hold so much important business data but are often so bad documented and backed up. This is often due to not optimal communication and understanding between system administrators and application developers respective DB administrators / DBAs.

It became important do at least document databases and be quickly able to determine if a server has a database running or not and where is the actual backup of the database etc.

The database module therefor has a sub-table application groups that help to combine various databases to a single group – like ERP system and on top of it TIR levels that should help to understand when and how often a backup is needed and how long it shall be kept. The IT Assets management will not enforce or check any TIR levels, but you can define them and assign them to certain databases, so they are at least documented and defined.

Besides those information, you can document every single database on a server rather detailed with important information to the database server engine version and CPU architecture and then even more important a very detailed way to document how the database is backed up and where the backups resides and how long backups are kept.

It is not the perfect way to document databases, but it is from an simple IT perspective better then most I personally have seen (often nothing) and it helps to quickly determine if, when and where the backup of the database resides and if there is a monitoring solution supposed to check if this is actually happening.

Data field and reference overview

  • Database status (online / offline / retired)
  • Application Group – this is a sub-table – in theory this was later replaced by the TAGs 
  • TIR level – a importance level and when backups need to be performed including or excluding transaction logs – defined in a sub-table
  • server reference
  • instance name on the server
  • database name
  • database engine and version as well as CPU architecture and if it supports compression
  • database description
  • is the database backed up and when does the backup happen as well as the type of backup (full, incremental etc.)
  • backup software like a script, SQL maintenance plan, third party software
  • which server is executing the backup
    • it might be executed on a central server to simplify management
  • transaction log backup or not
  • where are the backups stored – location
  • when will backups be cleaned up
  • it there monitoring configured on the e.g. the SQL server internal information and on the file-system
  • Notes and TAGs