Barton team update: ApexSQL Audit – Update 1

What have you been working on?

• We’ve been working on ApexSQL Audit 2015 R1 release. We’ve been addressing some performance, stability, and usability issues reported by our users, while also fixing issues noticed during testing.

What is the ETA to production?

• We plan to have a production ready tool by the end of the February.

What technical challenges have you encountered, overcome?

• Adaptation of the auditing filter and server management user interfaces to work well for users with a large number of servers. In previous versions we’ve only had a simple auditing filter (per server) which made it difficult to configure for environments with a large number of servers.

Will there be a public beta?

• Yes, we’ve released it here

What are some features planned in the next release(s)?

• Custom reports in GUI – we already support custom report creation in our web reports, now we’re bringing this feature to local reports.

• Advanced Filter – we plan to build an advanced UI that enables easy setup. It will be also easier to configure the large SQL Server sets.

• Check data integrity on archived databases – our plan is to address this in the next release by introducing required UI tools.

• Custom alert checking interval –starting with ApexSQL Audit 2015 R1 release all system alerts will have a customizable check interval.

• Alert if Audit remote instance is unreachable – the user will be notified by email if some instance is unreachable.

• Alert if SQL Server is not connectable – the user will be notified by email if some of the audited servers cannot be connected.

• Custom SQL alerts – in ApexSQL Audit 2015 R1 users will be able to schedule custom script execution on servers and get alert based on results.

What advantage does this tool/release have over other SQL auditing solutions?

• Lightweight UI built upon the latest technologies like .NET 4.5 and WPF.
• Fast processing, immediate collecting, data is available for the reporting almost immediately.
• Advanced filter that enables very precise and granular filtering and hence reducing the amount of unwanted data and producing minimal footprint on whole eco system.
• Powerful alerts with great responsiveness that can be configured very easily.
• Web based built-in reports that don’t require SSRS