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Category: Administration

Learning About the Power BI Activity Log

Published 2020-01-15 by Kevin Feasel

David Eldersveld takes us through the new Power BI activity log:

What is this activity data, and how is it valuable?

The audit/activity log data contains details for every interaction that users in your tenant have with the Power BI service (powerbi.com). Activities such as viewing reports, publishing apps, modifying gateway data sources, changing workspace security, and dozens of others have records broken out by user and timestamp.

Using this data, organizations not only know who does what and at what time. You can move beyond a simple audit trail to measure how well Power BI adoption is progressing at your enterprise. In this case, adoption targets for a group’s collective number of touchpoints can be compared to the actuals obtained from the logs—even down to the individual object level. Using the logs in this manner by combining actuals to targets, BlueGranite often finds underutilized reports or other opportunities to improve adoption.

Read on for more info about what it does, how it differs from the Office 365 audit log, and more.

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Monitoring Power BI On-Premises Gateways

Published 2020-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Jeff Pries shows us how we can monitor Power BI Enterprise Gateways:

To tie all of these steps together, I put together a brief C# console application which is capable of using stored credentials or prompting for credentials interactively, then performs the 4 steps listed above. Finally, the application receives the JSON response and de-serializes it and outputs it in a friendly way to the screen (or optionally inserts it into a SQL database table.

For the basics on how I perform the authentication and API query in the application, see my blog post here.

There are a few more steps than I would have anticipated.

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Don’t Miss These Settings in Azure SQL DB

Published 2020-01-14 by Kevin Feasel

Arun Sirpal takes us through a few things administrators tend to miss in Azure SQL Database:

2. Allow Azure Services and resources to access this server setting set to on/off?

I always set this to off. I do not like it ON.

Why? Because I like to control things via vnets (maybe IPs if really needed – it depends on your solution). Nowadays you can use private endpoint connections which allow connections from within a vnet to a private IP.  Sure, you may want to use IP addresses, if you do then I suggest database level firewall rules over server level, especially if you use failover groups.

There are several good ones here.

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Using dbatools to Manage Client Aliases

Published 2020-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Chrissy LeMaire takes us through client aliases and how to manage them in dbatools:

SQL Client Aliases allow you to connect to a SQL Server instance using another name. This is especially useful during migrations. Want your servers to connect to the new SQL Server without modifying connection strings within your application? Or what if you could use easy-to-remember names for your docker containers? SQL Client Aliases can help.

Click through for the commands and some quick demonstration.

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Working with App Locks in SQL Server

Published 2020-01-10 by Kevin Feasel

Nisarg Upadhyay explains how to use two built-in stored procedures to take and release application locks:

For example, I want to prevent users from executing the same stored procedure at the same time. To demonstrate the scenario, I have created a stored procedure named procInsertEmployees, which inserts data into the tblEmployee table. I want to make sure that no one can access the stored procedure until the stored procedure inserts the data in the tblEmpoyee table. Moreover, I have added a waitfor delay ’00:00:15’ statement to simulate the blocking for the 15 seconds.

Application locks also allow for more complicated scenarios and you can get a bit creative when assigning resources (such as combining a process name and a parent ID).

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Delegating Authentication using Managed Service Accounts

Published 2020-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

Jamie Wick helps us solve the classic Kerberos double-hop problem:

If the Report Server service doesn’t have permission to delegate to the SQL Server, it will try to connect anonymously (step 4 in the diagram above). Which results in this login error:

Login failed for user ‘NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON’. Reason: Could not find a login matching the name provided. [CLIENT: <Client IP Address>]

Historically report server and SQL server services, that needed the ability to delegate authentication to other servers, were configured to run using an Active Directory user account. Enabling delegation on these accounts was simply a matter of setting the Trust level on the Delegation tab of the account’s properties (with Active Directory Users & Computers).

But Jamie is here to show us a better way.

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Generating an Email List from Active Directory Users

Published 2020-01-08 by Kevin Feasel

James Livingston takes us through an interesting solution to a common problem:

If you’ve ever performed some impactful maintenance on a SQL Server, you probably notified users. If you’re great at documentation and already know exactly who to contact, this script isn’t for you. If you don’t have a user email list, this script will create it for you!

I used to manage 500 SQL Server instances and there was daily maintenance\changes going on constantly. I wrote this PowerShell script to automatically create an email list for me. This PowerShell script gathers the login information from an instance of SQL Server and then pulls their email address from Active Directory.

Read on to see the script in action.

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Checks After a DBA Leaves

Published 2020-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Rushton has some thoughts on a resiliency plan for DBA departures:

Transferring database ownership should be relatively straight-forward and risk-free. Except there are certain applications that depend on the database being owned by a sysadmin, or by a particular account (sa), or by their own service account, rather than checking for membership of the db_owner role… So make sure you test your changes.

Read the whole thing.

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Negative Port Numbers in SQL Server

Published 2020-01-02 by Kevin Feasel

Jason Brimhall takes us through a bit of a mystery:

Take quick note of the port number I have circled in red. This doesn’t match the original query at all. In fact, it doesn’t come anywhere close to the actual port number. In addition, the port number shown here is a negative value. Obviously a negative port is not correct as TCP/IP ports only range from 0-65535. So what is happening here?

Read on for the answer.

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