SQL Agent Insights:Documentation:Job Conflict Outlook Overview

The Job Conflict Outlook window is your view into potential job conflicts scheduled in the future.

Most monitoring products can show what has happened in the past, as the data exists within SQL Server® system tables. SQL Agent Insight however, takes this one step further and attempts to show scheduled jobs 24 hours into the future, depicting on a Gantt chart, any potential conflicts.

This allows savvy database administrators to see potential job conflicts, allowing them to reschedule a job if deemed necessary to avoid such conflicts.

Upon opening the Job Conflict Outlook window, SQL Agent Insight immediately determines all jobs that are eligible to be predicted.

For successful prediction into the future of when a job will execute the following conditions must be met:

The job must have a schedule. This might seem obvious, but jobs that are run manually are difficult to determine when they will be run.
The job must be enabled. Again, this might seem obvious, but a disabled job, even with a schedule will not run in the future.
The job to appear on the Gantt chart must have a frequency greater than 0 over the next 24 hours.
- Therefore, jobs that have schedules that run outside of the next most 24-hour window will not be shown.
If the job is part of a Master/Target (multi-server) configuration, must be of type Target (TSX). A Master (MSX) job will not run locally.
The job to appear on the Gantt chart must run at a minimum every 5 minutes. Any job with a frequency greater than this, (for example a job that runs every 1 minute), will not be eligible for performance reasons and is surely going to conflict with the majority of other jobs on the instance.

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Jobs with an average run time of 0 (zero) seconds will be charted with an average run time of 5 (five) seconds so that they are visible on the Gantt chart.

An eligible job, once meeting the aforementioned criteria, will be indicated by the green color band within the row header of the job in question. Conversely, a job that is ineligible to be predicted/charted will have a red color band within the row header.

A typical *Job Conflict Outlook* window.

The *Job Conflict Outlook* window with jobs selected and charted showing potential job conflicts colored in red on the Gantt chart.

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