This was one of the interesting issues I solved in many days. One of my clients contacted me and told that they have scheduled a maintenance plan to take t-log backup at 10 PM but it’s not running. When we look into the job history, it was not showing any history. Some problem statements like these are interesting because they look trivial and simple – yet they are convoluted and not straightforward to solve. Let us learn how to solve Error “Maintenance plan scheduled, but the job is not running as per schedule“
I asked them to show the problem so that I can see live and look at various things happening. I asked them to share LOG folder which contains SQLAgent.out files.
SQL SERVER – Where is ERRORLOG? Various Ways to Find ERRORLOG Location
When I looked into the file, I was able to find interesting messages like below.
2016-06-29 20:00:00 – ! [298] SQLServer Error: 229, The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object ‘sp_sqlagent_log_jobhistory’, database ‘msdb’, schema ‘dbo’. [SQLSTATE 42000] (ConnExecuteCachableOp)
2016-06-29 20:10:36 – ! [298] SQLServer Error: 229, The SELECT permission was denied on the object ‘sysjobschedules’, database ‘msdb’, schema ‘dbo’. [SQLSTATE 42000] (SaveAllSchedules)
2016-06-29 20:10:36 – ! [298] SQLServer Error: 229, The UPDATE permission was denied on the object ‘sysjobschedules’, database ‘msdb’, schema ‘dbo’. [SQLSTATE 42000] (SaveAllSchedules)
2016-06-29 20:10:36 – ! [376] Unable to save 1 updated schedule(s) for job T-log Backup 10 PM.Subplan_1
So above was the problem in Agent log file at 8 PM. I asked to open maintenance plan to try to save schedule it again. As soon as we did that, there was no error raised, but the job was not reflecting that schedule.
Fix/ Solution / Workaround:
I captured profiler while saving the Maintenance plan and found that permission from the SQL Agent account was not sufficient as I was seeing the error 298.
As per documentation: (Select an Account for the SQL Server Agent Service)
The account that the SQL Server Agent service runs as must be a member of the following SQL Server roles:
- The account must be a member of the sysadmin fixed server role.
- To use multiserver job processing, the account must be a member of the msdb database role TargetServersRole on the master server.
Later client informed me that this all started happening when they followed an article on internet to harden the security.
Moral of the story: Never trust on internet advice as not everything would be true. Always look at author and check his/her reliability.
Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)
First appeared on SQL SERVER – FIX Error: Maintenance plan scheduled but job is not running as per schedule