Our Managed Services Video Explanation

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Video Transcription:

Hi, I’m Steve Stedman and welcome to this short video on our services that we offer for managed services for SQL Server. Let’s look at the Stedman Solutions website and we’re going to go into the Managed Services area. This is just one of the many different products or services that we offer through Stedman solutions, what managed services does, it allows you to hire us to be that part time or fractional DBA, who’s going to be responsible for keeping your SQL Server in good shape. Basically, the way it works is, we’re there to help with whatever you need around that SQL server maintenance from doing windows and SQL server updates regularly to doing full SQL Server upgrades from one version to another, like 2016 to 2022, or something like that. We also have software that runs on the server that tracks and monitors things so that we get alerts when there’s problems. And that allows us to proactively jump in and help deal with problems when they come up on your SQL Server. Sometimes we must jump in and deal with jobs failing or helping sort those out. Sometimes it’s finding blocking queries. And we jump in and do a training session with your team on why specific queries are having blocking. And we come up with options on how to resolve those, we have two different overall levels of support that we offer.

One of them is the Agile support. And the other one is the highly available support option. And there’s a lot of different services here that are combined in both. But we’ll do things like quarterly test your backups, we’ll make sure that your backups are actually recoverable and usable on a regular basis so that you can trust and know that when we need to restore those, they’ll be available, we can help you manage all of your database backups, and make sure that those database backups are meeting your recovery time and your recovery point objectives. The worst thing is when somebody thinks they’ve got good backups, they find out they don’t well, we help make sure that that’s in place. And we get alerts of backups don’t happen frequently enough so that we know that if there’s an issue where you’re not covered, we can correct it quickly.

It includes licensing for database health monitor on all the servers that we’re monitoring. It also includes the blocking query monitoring tool, which I mentioned, this is where we get notification about where queries are blocking. We take care of managing your database maintenance jobs, your indexes your statistics, we do quarterly health check. And we’ll apply service packs or updates quarterly. Now this is the same between both agile are highly available support. With this, we can help you with capacity planning and reviewing blocking and things like that one of the differences that we get down to is that with the high available one, we do more frequent health checks. And then with this, we can set it up so that you get a daily or a weekly system status email that will show you things like is the overall performance improving what’s happening with the CPU week over week?

How many issues are we dealing with, what are the problems, we’re working on things like that, so you can get an update to see what’s improving, or what’s getting worse and how we must deal with improving it with your SQL Server will help with patching.

Then where it gets a little bit different between these is how often we meet with a team, we can do a monthly meeting with your team. And then we have up to two hours or up to four hours per month of mentoring with different team members. So, let’s say you have a development team that there’s some mentoring or some education that’s needed to help bring them up to speed on something that’s happening with a SQL Server, we’re happy to help with that.

Cover an upgrade every two years on these. And what that means is that if you want to upgrade from version SQL Server 2017 to 2019, we will help you every two years included with no extra cost, the process of getting that either migrated to a new server or upgraded in place or whatever the need is there.

Then where we get into the difference here is that with the highly available support, we have 24 by seven phone support, where you can call one of us and get a hold of one of us when you need help. And when I say one of us, it’s our team of three or four of us that will work to help make sure that your servers been managed well.

We also have after hours engagements per month with rollover options. So, we assume with high availability, things that we’re going to need to be able to jump in and help you after hours. Disaster recovery support is also included with that. And when we say after hours, that’s kind of afterhours emergency response if there’s something that we know we’re doing a server upgrade, and it’s going to happen Saturday night at 11pm after hours. Yeah, that’s not really built as an afterhours emergency because that’s a planned event.

With this you also get access to all the Steadman solutions online training courses for everybody that’s involved in the team there.

The difference between the two packages is our response time. One of them we’ve got a four-hour response time from 7am to 9pm. And the other one is two-hour response time, however, that two-hour response time may require a phone call. Not always responding that quickly to email if it’s the middle of the night. But if you’re on that highly available support youth call us at 2am. There’s an emergency going on wake us up, we will get the right team members involved to deal with getting your server straightened out with whatever is happening at that point in time.

Now, some people look at this. And they may say, well, what I really need is a full time DBA. Yeah, sometimes that’s what you need. But oftentimes, if we can cover a lot of the things that a normal DBA would do with a package like this monthly, rather than adding another employee to your team, and there’s some quotes here, we’ve got a lot of good feedback, and a lot of people who are using the service, they really value it. People who are on the managed services, I think out of all our clients are the people that have the most reliable servers because we’re doing everything possible for one flat fee to make sure that that server is going to be as reliable as it possibly can. We’d rather spend 10 hours preparing for that during the week, then have one hour of after our emergency response or one hour of downtime. For instance, if we can take more time, we get it all in shape so that we reduce the chance of those things happening those outages or downtimes, or emergency issues.

I’m Steve Stedman and this is just a quick wrap up on what our SQL Server managed services are. If you’re interested, let us know we’d be happy to discuss how we can help you with us. Thanks, and have a great day.

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