For one of our clients, we had helped them with their implementation in the production environment. The hosting provider had asked for a clear understanding of who will do what and what kind of responsibilities will be shared between the client production team and the hosting provider. We thought our readers might benefit from this list as well. In this case, the client production team had a good team of DBAs/Database Developers and so the entire monitoring and parts of the maintenance work was done by that team rather than the hosting provider team. Here is the spreadsheet.
| Topic | Hosting Provider | Client | |
| Database Server Set-up | |||
| SAN/RAID array configuration and hardware set-up | X | Instructions/Requirements from Client | |
| Windows 2003 64-bit Enterprise Edition + SP2 | X | ||
| Set up of the logical volumes | X | Instructions/Requirements from Client | |
| SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition 64-bit install + SP2 install + Cumulative Update #3 | X | Instructions/Requirements from Client | |
| Cluster set up for local failover | X | ||
| Log Shipping for site failover | X | Instructions/Requirements from Client | |
| Disaster Recovery Tests and runbook for disaster recovery | X | ||
| Instance and DB Configuration | |||
| Instance and DB configuration parameters | X | ||
| Login accounts and permissions | X | ||
| DB Creation | X | ||
| Schema object creation | X | ||
| Startup parameters | X | ||
| Trace Flag configuration | X | ||
| Maintenance | |||
| Back-ups (Configuring and verifying via restores from time to time) | X | Instructions/Requirements from Client | |
| Stats collection | X | ||
| Fragmentation monitoring and corrective action scripts | X | ||
| Integrity Checks | X | ||
| Proper Filesizes configuration | X | ||
| System/Services re-cycling (if at all necessary) | X | After confirmation from Client | |
| Monitoring | |||
| Wait Events and Queues Troubleshooting Scripts | X | ||
| Perfmon templates | X | ||
| Profiler templates | X | ||
| User defined Alert scripts configuration(severity errors, disk space, cpu/memory/io thresholds etc.) | X | ||
| Baseline performance analysis and configuration (Trend Analysis) | X | ||
| Event logs and SQL Error Logs monitoring | X | ||
| Auditing – System and Instance | X | ||
| SSIS and other packages configuration | X | ||
| Cluster monitoring, mirroring and hardware issues monitoring | X | ||
| Upgrades | |||
| Application DB Version Upgrades/Migrations | X | ||
| Application DB patches | X | ||
| Critical DB/application fixes | X | ||
| Patches | |||
| OS patches | X | After confirmation from Client | |
| Security Patches (OS or SQL) | X | After confirmation from Client | |
| SQL Server patches | X | After confirmation from Client | |
| Remote Logins | |||
| Administrator account password | X | X | |
| Another user with admin privs. | X | X | |
| sa password | X | X | |
