Five minutes to freedom: Installing Minion Enterprise

2.2, Articles, ME Trial, Minion Enterprise / By

Let’s take five minutes and get our entire enterprise in order.

Get your repo server, your Minion Enterprise download, and your license key (trial or permanent). Install and config take just five minutes.

02-Install1. Install

Extract the MinionEnterprise2.3Setup.exe and run it on your repository server.  Give the installation “localhost” for the instance name.

2. Install the license key

Once you receive your license key – trial or permanent – from MinionWare:

  1. Copy License.txt to C:\MinionByMidnightDBA\Collector on the repository server.
  2. Rename the file to License.dll
  3. From Powershell, run the command:
    C:\MinionByMidnightDBA\Collector\License.exe Install

3. Configure email for alerts

Connect to the repo server and insert your alert email:

USE Minion;
GO
INSERT INTO dbo.EmailNotification ( EmailAddress, Comment )
SELECT 'Your@Email.com' AS EmailAddress, 'DBA' AS Comment;

4. Configure servers

Insert (or bulk insert) server to the repo:

INSERT INTO dbo.Servers
(
 ServerName,
 ServiceLevel,
 Port,
 IsSQL,
 IsActive
)
VALUES
 ( 'Prod01', 'Gold', NULL, 1, 1),
 ( 'Prod02', 'Gold', NULL, 1, 1),
 ( 'Prod03', 'Silver', NULL, 1, 1),
 ( 'QA01', 'Silver', NULL, 1, 1),
 ( 'Dev01', 'Bronze', NULL, 1, 1),
 ( 'Dev02', 'Bronze', NULL, 1, 1);

5. You’re done!

Jobs will begin kicking off to collect data within the next hour. Some jobs run hourly, some run daily or weekly or monthly. You’ll start getting tables full of useful data, and email alerts that actually mean something.

If you’re impatient to start getting some of the good stuff right away, kick off the CollectorServerInfo% jobs manually. These populate data in the dbo.Servers table, which other jobs need to run. You’ll start noticing data in the Collector.DBProperties, Collector.ServiceProperties, and Collector.DriveSpace tables first, as these jobs run most frequently.

While ME is taking care of your shop for you, you can get to know it better with some of our better resources:

Download our free maintenance modules:

  • Minion Backup: Free SQL Server Backup utility with world-class enterprise features and full lifecycle management.
  • Minion Reindex: Free SQL Server Reindex utility with unmatched configurability.
  • Minion CheckDB: Free SQL Server CHECKDB that solves all of your biggest CHECKDB problems.