A Quick Look At The All New Undercover Catalogue, Preview Release Due Out Soon…

I thought I’d give you all a little preview of our latest offering, the Undercover Catalogue which should be available in Preview version very soon.

So what actually is it?

The Undercover Catalogue will help you to build up a picture of your entire SQL infrastructure.  It’ll go out, discover and interrogate all of your SQL Servers.

So it will find all my servers, you say?

The Catalogue will have an option to go out and find all the discoverable SQL Servers on your network as well as any that are explicitly specified in its configuration file.

OK, but what does it actually capture?

The pre-release version of the Catalogue will capture a number of useful pieces of information about your SQL Server estate.

Instances

Firstly there are the SQL instances themselves.  The Catalogue will gather the following information…

• Server Name
• Instance Name
• IP Address
• Number of CPUs
• Amount of RAM
• Max Server Memory
• Default Collation
• SQL Version
• SQL Edition

Databases

For every database on the instance, the following will be collected

• Database name
• Database owner
• Compatibility level
• Collation
• Recovery model
• Availability group that the database is part of (if applicable)
• File paths
• Database size

Logins

• Login name
• SID
• Any roles that the login is part of
• Password hash

Users

• User Name
• Database that the user is associated with
• Mapped login
• SID
• Any database level roles that the user is part of

Availability Groups

• AG Name
• Primary Server
• Secondary Servers
• Failover mode
• Availability mode (sync or async commit)

Agent Jobs

• Job name
• Job ID
• Description
• Category
• Date of creation
• Schedule
• Step information, including step code

If you’re anything like us, you’ll know how tricky it can be to remember what servers you’ve got, what they’re used for and the specifications of those servers.  We hope that that Undercover Catalogue will make keeping track of those things nice and simple.

All the data will be gathered from remote servers using a light weight PowerShell script and written into a central database.

The first Preview version will include the information detailed above but this will be just that start and will be expanded in future releases to cover other areas.  There are also plans for SSMS and/or Power BI reports and dashboards to make it easy to build up a picture of how your SQL Servers are configured and connected.

Keep an eye out the release of the first preview version of the Undercover Catalogue.