It is critical that you examine the health of your database server immediately after installing a third party vendor product. Vendor installs can be a source of frustration, especially when they make alterations to system tables. You may not notice these changes until months later, and by then it may be too late to assist in the event of a disaster.

Depending on your shop and the current monitoring tools you are using, the changes deployed by the vendor software may or may not cause you monitoring issues of your very own. Some of the more common issues with vendor installs would include the following:

• Creation of new jobs in SQL Agent
• Creation of linked servers
• Creation of databases on non-default drives
• Performing database backups to non-default locations
• Creation of server logins
• Creation of SSIS packages
• Altering server configurations

If you have auditing tools in place then you may already have an idea of all the activity that took place during the install. However, reviewing the amount of data generated during the install could be quite time consuming.

An alternative would be to use some custom scripts to gather some details prior to the vendor installation process and compare to the output from the same scripts after the installation is complete and the server has been rebooted. Even something as simple as "SELECT @@SERVERNAME" can give you a hint that trouble may lie ahead should that statement return a NULL value and not the expected name of the instance.

/*

1. Run this script prior to the vendor installation and save the output
	(in SSMS, you can output directly to a text file)
2. After the vendor install is complete, reboot the server (just in case)
3. Run this script again and compare the output to the original

This script will assist in helping to determine the following:

    * Check for status of @@SERVERNAME
    * Creation of linked servers
    * Creation of new jobs in SQL Agent
    * Creation of databases on non-default drives
    * Creation of server logins
    * Altering server configurations 
    * Creation of SSIS packages    
    * Performing database backups to non-default locations
    
*/

--check to make certain changes to the sysservers table does not interfere with @@SERVERNAME
SELECT @@SERVERNAME as [ServerName]

/* check for new linked servers created */
SELECT * 
FROM master..sysservers
ORDER BY schemadate

/* check for new jobs in SQL Agent */
SELECT * 
FROM msdb..sysjobs
ORDER BY date_created DESC, date_modified DESC

/* check for new databases created and location of data and log files */
SELECT *
FROM master..sysdatabases
SELECT *
FROM master..sysaltfiles

/* check for new server logins */
SELECT * 
FROM master..syslogins
ORDER BY createdate DESC, updatedate DESC

/* check server configurations, make sure advanced options are displayed
  they can be turned off manually afterwards by running the commented statement below
*/
EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE
GO

EXEC sp_configure
GO

/*
  EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options', 0
  RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE
  GO
*/

/* check to see if any packages have been created */
SELECT *
FROM msdb..sysdtspackages90
ORDER BY createdate DESC

/* check to see if any databases have been backed up to a non-default location */
SELECT TOP 100 *
FROM msdb..backupmediafamily
ORDER BY media_set_id DESC