This is Jason’s take on the monthly tasks for a SQL Server DBA (10 Monthly Maintenance Tasks for SQL Server). My recommendation is that these tasks should be automated where possible.

For example:

1. Verifying database backups can be easily automated using Powershell to pick up the latest backups and restore them on a test SQL Server.  Check out this example script from Jon Boulineau (here)
2. Implement a SQL Server monitoring solution to capture performance baseline, alert on threshold exceptions and produce monthly capacity reports. (See DBInsight’s monitoring solution here)
3. Capture SQL Server configuration/inventory information on a weekly basis and verify configurations are correct. SQL Server policy management based checking can help here or use Powershell to store your SQL Server configurations in a central database. You can then easily review SQL Server version numbers and identify SQL Servers that require patching. Here’s an article on how to gather SQL Server inventory information via Powershell (here) and another one from Allen White from Simple Talk (here)