Page History

IDERA SQL Compliance Manager 5.4 and later allow allows you to take advantage of the SQL Server Extended Events (XEvents) feature to track and archive specific events occurring in your monitored environment. SQL Server Extended Events is an event handling system that offers lower overhead and delivers performance gains over the default SQL trace method. In SQL Compliance Manager 5.4 and  later, only SELECT and DML events for SQL Server 2012 and later versions are supported by this feature. All functionality that works on top of these events, such as DML/Select filtering, Before-After data, sensitive column auditing, and more, work with this new method of capturing event data.

When Extended Events mode is enabled, events generate XEL files instead of trace files (.xel rather than .trc) but the files still are located in the Agent trace directory.

There are three two ways to enable Extended Event capture:

• Through stored procedures.Through the Manage Instance Properties - Audited Activities tab in the Web Console.
• Through the Registered SQL Server Properties window - Audited Activities tab in the Windows Management Console. 

  
  

  Note
  title Extended Events captures extra Execute events
  Due to differences in how Microsoft has implemented Extended Events compared to other auditing methods, when auditing via Extended Events the user will see extra Execute events as compared to the same data captured by other auditing methods.

  AnchorSQL4942SQL4942

  Note
  title Extended Events does not Support Auditing a specific table/object
  Due to technical limitations, Extended Events does not support auditing for a specific table/object. To audit a specific table/object please audit using SQL Trace or SQL Server Audit Logs. Anchor SQL4942 SQL4942

Prerequisites and conditions for enabling auditing using Extended Events

...

EXEC [dbo].[sp_enable_ExtendedEvents] <SERVER_NAME>,<YES/NO>

Enable Extended Event mode using the Web Console

Users wanting to take advantage of SQL Server Extended Events auditing capabilities can do so by completing the following steps:

1. In your IDERA SQL Compliance Manager Dashboard menu, Select the Instances tab.
2. Click the gear icon in the Options column for the instance you want to audit and select Properties (instance).
3. Select the Audited Activities tab. 
4. Under the Capture DML and Select activities options, select the Via Extended Events option to enable Extended Events auditing. 
5. Click OK.

...

Enable Extended Event mode using the Windows Management Console

...