Are there any tools to quickly test network reliability to a SQL server?
We are receiving error reports from a particular customer who has a random "connection failure" message popup throughout the day. We have identified a few spots where this error might occur, but at different times of the day the code executes perfectly. Some other research leads me to believe this might be a licensing issue too. I need something to give to their IT department.
This is not specific to SQL Server. Their IT department needs to watch their network and see what's going on.
Connection errors -
1) Are these happening from only within your Application ? For example, if a connection drops when connected thru SQL-Mgmt Studio , it means that no programming caused that error - its a SQL Server 'installation / licensing / admin / non-app / non-programmer' error.
2)If it does not drop from a sys-tool like studio, and only happens from your app - then you need to look at the application stack.
3) Are these long-running database connections, or OLTP -types ? From your description it does not look like it..
4) You can do multiple things I guess to peek into TCP/IP stuff (apart from SQL-server layer). Run pings in a loop ? (Not sure but why not). Look at TCP/IP keep alives.
5) If the network is unreliable it should show up in other ways, other things like outlook which requires a all-day-long connection, will show errors too.
For network monitoring tools you might want to start with looking at Servers Alive or Nagios.