Monitoring DBAs

  • I am a DBA,i had an account with IT Auditors asking me,who monitors my actions in the database.I could not answer because there is no one who does that.How best can the actions be motored to the satisfactory level of auditors.

    “When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’” - Sydney Harris

  • What is the question?

  • Ask the auditors what level of monitoring they require.

    Gail Shaw
    Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
    SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability

    We walk in the dark places no others will enter
    We stand on the bridge and no one may pass
  • I have rephrased the post.

    “When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’” - Sydney Harris

  • As Gail said, I would first ask the auditers what they define as monitoring and what they want you to monitor.

    Then you can take it from there as what to create, be it custom DDL triggers, automated processes etc.

  • You can look at these products to get an idea of what 3rd Party tools are doing to address this.

    IBM InfoSphere Guardium

    http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/guardium/monitor-privileged-users/

    Idera SQL compliance manager

    http://www.idera.com/SQL-Server/SQL-compliance-manager/

    iMPERVA SecureSphere

    http://www.imperva.com/products/dsc_database-security-and-compliance-overview.html

    Again this is a short list just to show what vendors are doing to address the need.

  • It does depend a lot on what the auditors would consider an adequate level of monitoring.

    Perhaps a server-side trace would be good enough. That would be pretty minimal level, and relatively easy to bypass, but it might be good enough for what they need. This one would be for "we trust you, we just need to know what you've done so we can account for it".

    Perhaps one of the high-security 3P auditing tools like what Lumigent, Blackbird, and Idera can do, would be required. That's "we can't/don't trust you, or anyone else, and need to know everything that goes on, for legal/security/paranoia reasons".

    Perhaps something in between.

    The built-in auditing tools have data here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc280386.aspx

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  • Ok,thank you.

    “When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’” - Sydney Harris

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