The plug-in ships fourteen compliance rules. They evaluate against data already collected, so they cost nothing extra to run against the instance.
Prerequisites for this page
- The compliance standard associated with the target. See Where results appear.
- The monitoring login. The rules evaluate against configuration the plug-in already collects, and need no additional grants.
In this page: The rules · Where results appear · How they evaluate · A note on xp_cmdshell
The rules
Section titled “The rules”| Rule | Flags |
|---|---|
| SQL Server Version Nearing or Past End of Support | An instance on a release at or past Microsoft’s end of support |
| Database AUTO_SHRINK Enabled | A database set to shrink itself automatically |
| Max Server Memory Not Configured | An instance left on the default, unbounded memory setting |
| Max Degree of Parallelism At Default | MAXDOP never set for the workload |
| Max Worker Threads Manually Overridden | A manual override of a setting best left automatic |
| CLR Integration Enabled | CLR turned on |
| xp_cmdshell Enabled | Shell execution from SQL turned on |
| File Autogrowth Set To Percentage | Percentage growth, which grows unpredictably as a file gets larger |
| Database Has Multiple Transaction Log Files | More than one log file, which gains nothing |
| Database Backup Is Stale | No recent backup |
| Full-Recovery Database Without Log Backup | Full recovery model with no log backups, so the log grows without bound |
| Index Fragmentation - Reorganize Recommended | Fragmentation past the point where a reorganise helps |
| Index Fragmentation - Rebuild Recommended | Fragmentation past the point where only a rebuild helps |
| SQL Server Agent Not Set To Automatic Start | The Agent not set to start automatically |
Each rule carries a recommendation describing what to do about it, not just what is wrong.
Where results appear
Section titled “Where results appear”On the target’s Compliance → Results page in Enterprise Manager. Compliance results are per target, so an estate view comes from Enterprise Manager’s own compliance dashboards rather than from the plug-in.
The version end-of-support rule is the one most estates should look at first — it is the rule that finds the instances nobody remembered were still running.
How they evaluate
Section titled “How they evaluate”Rules read values from collected metrics rather than querying the instance themselves. Two consequences worth knowing:
- A rule cannot produce a result before the metric it depends on has collected. On a newly added target, configuration-derived rules stay unevaluated until the first configuration collection — up to 24 hours. See Targets and properties.
- Turning off a collection turns off the rules that depend on it.
The end-of-support rule fires on SQL Server 2016 and earlier. Releases still inside their support lifecycle do not trigger it, so a clean result on a 2019 instance is a correct result rather than a rule that failed to run.
A note on xp_cmdshell
Section titled “A note on xp_cmdshell”The plug-in flags xp_cmdshell as a finding, and it does not ask you to enable it. Its own backup and restore jobs use native T-SQL.
This is worth stating plainly because some monitoring tools require the very setting they warn you about. This one does not.
Related
Section titled “Related”- Monitoring pages - the Capacity page, which covers adjacent ground
- Alerts and thresholds - metric thresholds, which are a separate mechanism
- Credentials - the least-privilege position the rules assume
- Prerequisites - the versions the end-of-support rule checks against