How to Recreate the SBSMonitoring Database

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Damian Leibaschoff from Commercial Technical Support]

In SBS 2008 and SBS 2011 standard, we have a service called the Windows SBS Manager that is responsible for a number of tasks around monitoring, alert reporting and maintenance. This service relies on a SQL database running on a SQL express instance called SBSMonitoring. Under certain circumstances, the database may become unusable, when this happens you can experience behaviors like the SBS console crashing, or incorrectly reporting the status of machines. When this happens there might be a need to create a new, blank, database to regain functionality. Since all the information collected is dynamic, by creating a new database you would lose only any custom reports you may have created in the SBS Console, report customizations, and all the archived reports. Furthermore, upon recreating the database, it will need some time to contact all clients and report on their status, this time may vary, since clients may be offline, it is recommended to wait 48hrs before trying to validate the data.

To recreate the databases use these steps:

  1. Download the following package: https://skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/MonitoringDBRecreate/Create-SBSMonitoringDb.zip?cid=d5fe25afb6c3615f&sc=documents
  2. Extract the files to c:windowstemp
  3. Complete the one set of the following steps according to the version you are working with:

For SBS 2008

  1. Launch an administrative PowerShell session
  2. Launch the script:
    C:windowstempCreate-SBSMonitoringDb.ps1
  3. After completing the script and verifying that that monitoring is working, complete the steps in this article: https://blogs.technet.com/b/sbs/archive/2009/07/14/sbs-2008-console-may-take-too-long-to-display-alerts-and-security-statuses-display-not-available-or-crash.aspx

For SBS 2011 Standard

  1. Launch "C:Program FilesWindows Small Business ServerBinMoveDataPowerShellHost.exe" as an administrator
  2. Launch the script:
    C:windowstempCreate-SBSMonitoringDb.ps1

Trouble Shooting:

File C:windowstempcreate-sbsmonitoringdb.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system. Please see "get-help about_signing" for more details.
By default we should have the required code execution policy on our SBS servers, this issue is usually related to the way the script was downloaded into the affected server. Open the properties of the download script file from Windows Explorer and click on the Unblock option.