A customer recently wanted to know if any of their instances were too old and out of support. This was for a compliance purpose, and they had the need to show a report to management of when instances were out of compliance with policies.
This post shows how you can do this in Redgate Monitor.
This is part of a series of posts on Redgate Monitor. Click to see the other posts
Compliance Templates
This is an Enterprise feature, but it allows the administrators of Redgate Monitor to define templates for how the various servers and databases ought to be configured. Deviance from standards, or compliance with standards is often something auditors care about you documenting.
This is very easy with Redgate Monitor. Let’s see how this works.
Under the Security tab (appears in Enterprise edition), you can see there is a Configuration Compliance item. Click this.
This brings up the Configuration Compliance screen. This starts with Servers (highlighted with a bar to denote this tab, but there are also databases and Compliance templates. We want to choose compliance templates.
This tab shows the various templates that exist already in the system. I’m looking at monitor.red-gate.com, which has three templates configured already.
If you scroll to the right, we can see that two of these are server (instance) templates and one is a database template. We can add a new one, or edit existing ones. For this post, I’ll edit the Workload Server template.
After we click Edit, we get another set of tabs for the template itself. The default is for security, but there are also performance and environment options. Pic the Environment tab.
This brings up a list of settings. Scroll down to the bottom and you will see what settings below for Product Level, Product Version, Product version number, and Edition.
In this case, the template is checking that every server has at least SQL Server 2019 Enterprise installed. If any other version were installed, this would show as non compliant. This is useful for grouping your servers by versions.
The values entered here are the ones you would get back from the ServerProperty() function.
Summary
This post shows how you can configure a compliance template to check that the versions of SQL Server you have installed meet your requirements for a version.
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