How do you manage a large environment?

I was a DBA for more than  400 instances.

• Did I do all that by myself?
• Was the whole environment standardised ?
• Did nothing ever go wrong?
• Did I look through all the error logs on a daily basis by hand?

Of course the answer to all these questions is a big fat NO.

I'll explain how managing a large environment like this works, and I'll do it in such a way that even if you have 5 instances, this should still be useful.

Expect 50% processes and war stories and 50% scripts and demos (lots of PowerShell of course, but not everything)