Monitoring Free Space on Server

Database administrators need to take up the stewardship of the server; any issues and be
prepared to burn the midnight oil. A job goes down or a database fails to respond or the
server fails to start, DBAs are always on the hot seat. Today we will be discussing a very
important aspect of disk usage and space monitoring. It’s one of the fundamental duties of
a DBA to manage and monitor the disk usage.

All the databases reside physically in .MDF .LDF files on the drives. There are jobs running,
backups taken, maintenance plans and most importantly the database keeps growing. In
this scenario monitoring the Server to ensure that there is enough space to support the
growing demands is really important.

There are a lot of different ways in which we can monitor the drives for free spaces. I would
be discussing a very simple yet effective way that does the trick for us, “xp_fixeddrives”.
SQL Server offers this undocumented, extended stored procedure for monitoring free spaces
on the system that hosts the SQL Server.

Executing the below statement gives the system details. All the available drives and the free
spaces in MB on each of them are listed.

EXEC master.dbo.xp_fixeddrives

drive MB free
----- -----------
C 38126
D 79906

(2 row(s) affected)

It is not feasible for a DBA to run this statement every 30 mins and check if the system has
enough free space. Trust me when I say this that DBAs are no free birds  so let us try to
make their job a little less tiresome.

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[MonitorFreeSpace]

AS

SET NOCOUNT ON
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
SET ANSI_NULLS ON

BEGIN

DECLARE @ThreshHold INT

DECLARE @COUNT INT
DECLARE @CatchDrive CHAR(1)
DECLARE @SubStr VARCHAR(2000)
DECLARE @MsgStr VARCHAR(2000)

/*We have set the thresh hold limit for our drives as 2 GB*/
SET @ThreshHold=2048

/*Table variable to host drives & free spaces details*/

DECLARE @SpaceInfo TABLE(
ID INT IDENTITY(1,1),
Drive CHAR(1),
MBFreeSpace INT)

INSERT INTO @SpaceInfo EXEC xp_fixeddrives

SELECT @COUNT=MIN(ID) FROM @SpaceInfo

/*Looping through all the drives */
WHILE (@COUNT IS NOT NULL AND @COUNT<=(SELECT MAX(ID) FROM @SpaceInfo))
BEGIN
/*Checking for the free space on the drive against preset threshhold */
IF ((SELECT MBFreeSpace FROM @SpaceInfo WHERE ID=@COUNT)<@ThreshHold)
BEGIN

SELECT @CatchDrive=Drive FROM @SpaceInfo WHERE ID=@COUNT

SET @SubStr='SERVER MyServerName - Available Space on
'+@CatchDrive+ ': Drive below critical limit.'
SET @MsgStr='Attention !! The free space on '+@CatchDrive+':
drive is below the prescribed threshold of'+CONVERT(VARCHAR(20),@ThreshHold)
+'MB.'

/*Send mail to the concerned for ASAP assistance*/

EXEC master.dbo.xp_sendmail
@recipients =N'abc.xyz@microsoft.com',
@subject =@SubStr,
@message =@MsgStr

END
SET @SubStr=''
SET @MsgStr=''
SET @COUNT+=1
/*check for the next drive*/
END
END

Here we have created a very simple procedure. Let me tell you what it does. Initially we’ll
set a threshold limit of 2 GB which could vary on different servers depending upon server
usage and size of the drives on the host system. Next we get the list of all the drives
available on the server and also the free spaces in each of them. We loop through all these
drives to check if the available space is less than the preset thresh hold limit. If it is so, we
will send a mail to the DBA reporting the same for immediate assistance.

We could automate this procedure to run in a desirable frequency depending upon our
requirement and the criticality of the Server. Using SQL Agent we can create a Job with T-
SQL step for executing this procedure and have a schedule in place for the job. Alternatively
we can trigger the procedure from SQLCMD or OSQL via a .CMD file and schedule the CMD
via MS Batch. The idea is to get the intimation much before the damage is done.

We can also log the disk usage info into a table by comparing free space between intervals.
This should be done regularly to help derive a trend and plan accordingly.
Administering the disk usage is really important as this will help the DBA to get things in
place in time else one would live in fear of running out of spaces and also putting all the
database supported applications in a critical state.