SBS 2008 Monitoring Database grows too big

Yes – I had this happen on my SBS 2008 server myself.  Instead of taking the normal route to try and resolve it however, I decided to mess with a few SQL commands and try to dig under the covers to see if I could delete data that was too old.  I thought that this might allow me to reduce the content of the database so that I could not go through the hassle of replacing it.  Sadly my SQL skills are not that good and I ended up making the database log files all that much more bigger to the point that I nearly ran out of disk space.

Oh well – I tried it on my system and not a customers system.

End result however is that if your SBS 2008 Monitoring Database grows beyond the 4GB limit, you’ve got no real choice but to replace it with an empty one.  Best place to get one is from a new customer server – or if you don’t have one of those, then you can download a fresh one from here .

Once you have your empty database, the procedure is quite simple.

1. Stop any backups that you have running – ie the SBS 2008 backup or ShadowProtect.
2. Open the Services MMC from the Administrative Tools program group
3. Stop the Windows SBS Manager service and the SQL Server (SBSMONITORING) service.
4. Rename or in my case delete the SBSMonitoring.mdf and the SBSMonitoring_log.ldf files from the C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data folder
5. Copy the replacement LDF and MDF files into the same location
6. Start the SQL Server (SBSMONITORING) service
7. Start the Windows SBS Manager service
8. Given that you’ve replaced the database with an empty one, you will need to use the SBS 2008 Console and reconfigure your reporting and alerts.
9. Also do not forget to re-enable your backups once more and do a backup of your server with the new database in place.

To configure SBS 2008 Alert Notifications do the following;

1. Open the Windows SBS Console
2. Select the Network tab
3. Select the View notification settings task from the task pane on the right hand side
4. Select the Email Address tab and enter in your email address for notifications
5. Select OK to close and save the settings

To configure SBS 2008 Reports do the following;

1. Open the Windows SBS Console
2. Select the Reports tab
3. Select the Add a new report task from the task pane on the right hand side
4. Configure the report to contain the information you need and select OK