Ben Emmett

13 July 2021

Enabling Single Sign-On with SQL Monitor

It’s never been more critical to protect your data infrastructure against malicious actors, with organizations dealing with an ever-expanding number of increasingly sophisticated attacks.

Monitoring solutions represent part of your infrastructure’s attack surface area – they enjoy highly privileged access to the systems they help manage, and store sensitive information about the workloads running on them. So while those monitoring platforms provide enormous value, carefully restricting access to them is essential.

You can now secure access to SQL Monitor using Single Sign-On through the industry-standard OpenID Connect protocol. Single Sign-On through OpenID Connect allows you to authenticate users through a range of providers which support this approach, like Azure Active Directory, ADFS, Okta, and many more. It also means SQL Monitor supports measures like multi-factor authentication via these providers.

Compared to SQL Monitor’s existing direct Active Directory integration, using OpenID Connect significantly improves flexibility for system administrators, provides easier centralized user management, dramatically simplifies setup & configuration in multi-domain scenarios and significantly enhances the overall security of the monitoring system.

Just as with the existing direct Active Directory authentication approach, users or groups can be assigned roles with different privilege levels and can be granted access only to view specific servers based on their needs.

Single Sign-On through OpenID Connect is available from SQL Monitor v11.2, a free upgrade for all supported customers. To help users set it up, the SQL Monitor documentation describes how to enable and configure Single Sign-On through OpenID Connect.

Using Single Sign-On is one measure among many which can help improve security. You can read more about other steps you can take to protect your database monitoring environment in our whitepaper, Hardening a Monitoring Installation.

If you’re new to SQL Monitor and would like to see how it can help you monitor large, mixed estates more effectively, you can download a fully-functional 14-day free trial, or try our live online demo environment.