'Job did not start' alerts for 0 duration jobs

kevriley

I have been getting 'job did not start' alerts for some of the jobs on my production server, but when I check the jobs in SSMS, they have started, succesfully competed, but have a duration of 00:00:00

I guess this 0 duration is somehow causing the alert to fire.

Can anyone confirm this to be the case?


Kev

SQL Response 1.2.0.219

Brian Donahue

Hi Kevan,

SQL Response will check to see that a scheduled job had run by examining its' "next run date" and "last run date" fields in the MSDB database. It should not discriminate against jobs that have no duration because it does not check that, except when checking for long-running jobs. There are other reasons why you may get a job not run alert:

Possible causes:
Previous execution of this job was overrunning
SQL Server Agent was not running (a SQL Server Agent not running alert is raised when SQL Response first detects that SQL Server Agent is not running)
No target servers defined

Could it be one of these?

kevriley

Brian,

thanks for the response. I have rechecked one of the alerts

Previous execution of this job was overrunning - No - in fact the previous run had also finished with 0 duration, but that hadn't fired an alert

SQL Server Agent was not running (a SQL Server Agent not running alert is raised when SQL Response first detects that SQL Server Agent is not running) - No - agent was certainly running

No target servers defined - No, the target is set to 'local server'


It is strange that other runs of the same job that have 0 duration are not triggering the alert - so I guess it isn't strictly a 0 duration issue. Could it be that SQL Response is doing a dirty read on the MSDB database?


Kev

dlkj

Hi Kev,

We've had some issues in the past with false positives with the job did not run alert.

What is the schedule of the job?

Cheers,
--
Daniel

kevriley

Daniel,

schedule is "Occurs every day every 12 minute(s) between 00:10:00 and 23:40:00"

Kev

dlkj

Hi Kev,

Does there seem to be any pattern to the false positives?

I'm going to try and replicate the issue on a test machine.

Cheers,
--
Daniel

kevriley

Daniel,

there seems to be no pattern. It is affecting different jobs at different times on different servers.

Kev

dlkj

Hi Kev,

I've not had any joy reproducing the issue.

What reason does SQL Response give for the job not running?
Are the alert repository and the monitored server in the same time zone?

kevriley

Daniel,

Reason for not starting: Reasons unknown

All servers are on the same timezone

Kev

dlkj

Hi Kev,

Could you email me a copy of the job history and the details of some of the false positive alerts that you've seen so we can try to correlate the issue.

Cheers,
--
Daniel

kevriley

Daniel,

will do. Should I use support@red-gate.com?

How do you want the data? Job history I could export to Excel.
Alerts - how do you want these?


Kev

dlkj

Hi Kev,

yes, support@red-gate.com will be fine.

Exported to excel or csv would be ideal.

A few screen shots of the alerts and a list of the most recent occurrences would be great.

Cheers,
--
Daniel

kevriley

Daniel,

have just emailed you.

Kev

dlkj

Just to close off this thread:

We have managed to reproduce the problem and have logged it in our bug track system.

Unfortunately we haven’t come up with a work around, but we are hoping to address this in an upcoming release.

--
Daniel