This article explains how to use the Options wizard to adjust and change your SQL Estate Manager settings.

General

Here you can change the startup options:

• whether to load last saved environment settings file on SQL Estate Manager startup or not.
• enable Verbose logging – use this only for diagnostics purposes or when asked by the support team
• turn on automatic update check
• adjust proxy settings

Save

Allows you to customize how documents are saved. Tags used while constructing the header and footer are:CompanyName, Logo, AppName, Date, Page and TotalPages. By using the | separator the location of each tag can be specified i.e. if it is set {CompanyName}||{Logo} for the header, the company name will appear in the upper left corner of the page, the upper center will be blank and the upper right corner of the page will contain the logo (if uploaded).

The default footer is set to Generated by {AppName} on {Date}|Page {Page}/{TotalPages} i.e. application name and the date of report export will appear in the lower left corner of the page, the lower center will be blank and the lower right corner of the page will contain the number of the page currently opened and total page number.

Service Settings

This section allows you to configure SQL Estate Manager Service running period. The time you set here is the time when the Service will start taking an automatic snapshot and collecting the data you defined in the Snapshot Options.

A Minimal period is every four hours. The SQL Estate Manager service will start executing defined task at the selected time and it will be repeated a selected number of days or hours (default value: 1 day). You can also define period value, i.e. intervals in which Service runs depending on the period type.

Snapshot Options

This section allows you to customize the detect options. You can check the Detect SQL servers on workstations option and Enable autodetect option to detect automatically all SQL servers in your domains before each snapshot.

You can also choose what will be loaded in a manual or automatic snapshot. Available options are: Server Information, Installed Programs and Available Updates, Database Role Membership, Database Object Details, Advanced Database Object Details, SQL Server Agent, Analysis Services, Integration Services and Reporting Services.

Use load performance slider to switch between low resource usage load to a high-performance load.

Data Retention

In this section, the user can set how long the database data will be kept for. After the configured time period elapses, all of the data records from SQL Estate Manager database older than the configured time period will be deleted. The default time period for storing the data records is 6 months. SQL Estate Manager service will execute this job every day at the random time between 1:30AM and 5AM.

Set the preferred database size and SQL Estate Manager will warn you when database size passes the defined threshold.

If your SQL Estate Manager database becomes too big, you can force manual data retention using Execute button. Please note that this action will also try to execute SHRINKDATABASE command on you SQL Estate Manager database, which will fail unless you have the necessary permissions – member of the sysadmin or db_owner role by default. Specified data will still be deleted but database size will not reduce until this command is executed, using SQL Estate Manager or directly on SQL server.

Please note that there is an option to “Mark Configuration as Good”. Meaning that you can mark a certain snapshot and it will be excluded from data retention policy.

Subscription Settings

If you wish to use Subscriptions and Alerts feature, check in Subscriptions Enabled box. Configure job execution time and on which day will the weekly reports be sent on. Time of the day to send subscriptions option determines at which time will daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly subscription be sent, while Send weekly subscriptions option on dictates the day at which weekly subscriptions will be sent.

To enable email as a preferred delivery method, configure outgoing email server settings. After the outgoing email server settings are provided, you can test if these are valid by clicking the Test Email Settings button. There is also an option to customize the email footer and email body text.

Compare

This section allows you to define which environment settings should be compared in the Compare Wizard. The selection you make here will be used as a default template when comparing two environments, but you can modify it directly in the Compare Wizard each time you use it.