Auditing with SQL Profiler

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the content posted at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/bkelley/

    K. Brian Kelley
    @kbriankelley

  • Wow. I nicely written, intelligent, grammatically correct (99% anyway) article that I could follow step by step with clear instructions to guide me through a useful learning process. I'm impressed. Nice one Mr. Kelley. I've been using Profiler for years and know that it is a great tool for this type of security auditing. One thing about SQL Profile is that, instead of requiring users to be in the sysadmin role in order to use the tool, you should be able to dole out permissions to non-sysadmin users. I've seen plenty of cases where good sql developers, who we did not want to give sysadmin role to on security-tight servers, could have used the tool without abusing it if we could have given them permissions. Is this possible?

    -Vic

  • It was in SQL Server 7 by granting permissions to certain stored procedures. However, that mechanism was unsupported. I've not seen a similar write-up in SQL Server 2000. The problem is too much information goes across that a good developer shouldn't see. Things like who's logged on (Existing Connection), and visibility into other databases that a developer may not on a normal basis have access to see.

    K. Brian Kelley
    @kbriankelley

  • Nice job, like you I use profiler extensively for looking into issues and/or monitoring my servers.  Like you said it's not the easiest tool to first get your hands around but after you get familiar with the tool it will be your best friend.  It would be nice to see what other options people use in profiler as I know I have my own set of traces to monitor or just look at what’s going on under the covers that I run weekly.

    Thanks

    cjb-

     

  • Hi Brian, great article. Quick question from somebody that never used SQL Profiler before. Is this better to be used for ad-hoc situations where you would need to see in that moment who is logged on? or it can be used as a auditing tool where you set the traces and leave it collecting the data and then later on we go there and check the info generated? I think what I'm trying to ask if this can be run like a service or you would be to logged on at that moment to run the trace to see the results?

    thanks in advance and sorry if this is not the right place to ask this dummy questions.

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