Last month I wrote about leveraging policy based management for regular DBA compliance checks. You can read that post here.

Policy based management(PBM) is indeed one of my favorite features. I normally like to play around exploring more and more about it, and eventually end up learning something new(Yay!).

Today’s post is based on that surprise learning. Small but very useful feature.

PBM currently lacks flexible reporting capabilities like sending an automated email to the DBA every week stating compliance status or even a reporting dash-board for the DBA to constantly monitor the details. I hope Microsoft is working on these enhancements, and we can expect some good news when next major bits of SQLServer is out.

Note - Enterprise policy management framework has great enterprise wide policy compliance reporting capabilities, and I’m still exploring this great tool. This is a codeplex project and you can explore the same by following http://epmframework.codeplex.com/

So here is my little story – When I walk in to office on a Monday morning I wanted to know which servers are having compliance issues. To start of I ‘m interested to check my super critical business servers. I used to connect to those servers and do a View History(Under Management->Right click Policy Management)  to get the details of compliance issues.

Note - I evaluate my policies on a schedule.

Recently I observed a quick alert when connected to a  server from SSMS which was telling me that there was a policy compliance issue, and I need to act on it.

The alert looks like – There was indeed a policy violation which was picked by a schedule which ran on the weekend. Monday morning when I connected to that box,SSMS reported me that there is a policy violation via the above described small(but very helpful) graphical alert.

Once we fix the compliance issues, the alert is removed. Conclusion

These simple but useful features is indeed helpful for DBA’s to have better control over compliance issues and I’m really looking forward for more and more features and enhancements for PBM from Microsoft SQLServer team.

Thanks for reading and keep watching this space for more.