You already use sp_Blitz and the rest of the free, open source First Responder Kit to give your SQL Servers a health check now and then.

But let’s be honest: you don’t do it often enough.

You wish you had an easier way to know when your backups stop working, when corruption strikes, when a poison wait is detected, or when a new SQL Server patch comes out for one of your servers.

Good news! We’ve now got a free version of SQL ConstantCare®!

SQL ConstantCare® is our simple monitoring product that you install on a jump box or VM. It connects to your SQL Servers, Azure SQL DB, Amazon RDS, etc. just once per day, gathers diagnostic data, and sends it to our processing servers in AWS. We generate a single daily email per server telling you specific, actionable tasks that will make your databases safer.

The full-blown $695/year version of SQL ConstantCare® gives you performance advice on stuff like query plans, indexes, memory settings, and wait stats, but there are a lot of folks out there who just don’t need that. They can’t fix the databases, queries, or indexes, and they just wanna know that the server is healthy.

That’s where our free health-only monitoring comes in. Sign up here for free, then download the installer, and follow the installation instructions. In a matter of minutes, you’ll get an email, and then again once a day – but only when we’ve got stuff you actually need to do on the server. Otherwise, we leave you alone to do the other important stuff you gotta do every day.

Why are we doing this? What’s the catch?

It’s easy for us to support because we’re not doing anything complex like putting agents on SQL Servers, or running 24/7 monitoring. The app just runs on your jump box as a scheduled task, once per day, and that’s it.

It’s cheap for us to provide because the health-only processing costs us less than $1 per monitored SQL Server per month. We designed SQL ConstantCare® to be serverless and cloud-native right from the start, and Richie’s done a lot of work keeping the code and database lean and mean, so scaling has been pretty easy.

Our back end is fully cloud-hosted, which means your diagnostic data goes up to our services in AWS. If you’ve got questions about how that works, check out how we collect, transmit, and store your data and the frequently asked questions. To help us with GDPR compliance, we automatically delete all data older than 30 days. We won’t ever offer a version of SQL ConstantCare® that you can host yourself – we rely on too many AWS services, and helping you set all that up and troubleshoot it would make the price tag crazy high. If you want your own private monitoring, you’re better off buying a conventional 24/7 monitoring app. Of course, those are more expensive, and priced per monitored server – but if you want that level of control, that’s the price you pay. (Literally.) We’re trying to help as many people as we can here, as inexpensively as possible.

The signup process is a little wonky, not as smooth as I’d like. When you click the signup link, you’ll be asked to sign up with an email or Google. If you’ve bought training classes or software from me in the last few years from training.brentozar.com, you can use the same login. If you hit any roadblocks signing up and you can’t figure out how to get past ’em, email Help@BrentOzar.com and include a screenshot of the full browser, including the URL you’re on.

I hope this helps make your job easier. Like the First Responder Kit, this here blog, and the tons of videos we put out across my YouTube channel, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc, I really want to help do as much as I can, for free. That way, when you need training or consulting, you’ll remember who loves ya, baby. Enjoy!