Reporting Services Job Monitor

I’ve just posted the source code to an application I wrote 2½ years ago, whilst at the same time started using it again.

The Reporting Services Job Monitor (RSJM) application was originally written to monitor long running reports in Microsoft Report Server. Long running reports are easy to make (especially if your SQL is good enough to compile but not quite good enough to understand the dangers), hard to find and can cripple a report server. If that report server is also your production SQL Server long running reports can be a serious problem.

The first step in addressing the problem is visibility, which is what RSJM was written to do. Using the RS web service it checks for jobs starting and stopping, writing out a ‘report log’ to the application. The application was posted to CodePlex as an MSI.

Recently, someone contacted me, asking if it was possible to monitor multiple servers. It certainly is possible, but isn’t something which RSJM currently does. I don’t really have the time to do this right now, but I saw no reason why I shouldn’t post the source to CodePlex, so that if other people want to add functionality, they can do. If they do, and it works, I can update the main MSI source on the project, so that everyone can use it.

Funnily enough, about the same time, we started to experience what I call “SQL brownouts” – random timeouts indicative of a long-running query. Somebody suggested the ability to monitor which jobs were running, which reminded me of the tool. Luckily I’d uploaded it CodePlex as I would have struggled to find it otherwise!

So, if anyone else wants to monitor Reporting Services jobs, have a look at RSJM. And if anyone fancies a small project, try adding multiple server functionality – the source is all on the RSJM Homepage.