What daily checks would you perform as a SQL Server administrator or production developer?

Daily checks should be driven by service-level requirements and automation, but a practical production checklist includes failed jobs, backup success and recoverability, database availability, disk and log space, blocking/deadlocks, critical errors, abnormal waits, performance regressions, integrity-check status, replication or availability health where applicable, and security or configuration alerts.

A mature environment automates collection and alerting instead of depending entirely on manual checks. Trends are often more useful than isolated numbers: database growth, backup duration, query latency, CPU, I/O, waits, and job duration should be monitored over time.

For application developers, the same operational mindset is valuable: production database performance, recovery, security, and observability are part of application reliability, not solely DBA responsibilities.