Setting up SQL Server Agent jobs for monitoring

To receive more precise information about the progress of your SQL Server Agent jobs, set up the jobs using one or more of the following suggestions:

• Break large jobs down into smaller jobs so that the SQLAgentJobFailures parameter monitors each stage of a job, giving you more accurate information about where and when a job fails (if it fails).
• Create the SQL Server Agent job in Transact SQL so that no failure occurs for steps that you want to ignore.
• Create the SQL Server Agent job so that any error that occurs at a strategic step sends a user-defined message to the SQL Server Agent error log, and then include that user-defined message for monitoring by using the KM Commands > KM Admin > Set up Error Log String Monitoring menu command from an Error Log application instance. (How to initiate and use error log monitoring is described in the next topic, Monitoring-error-logs.)