Using SQL Server Discovery Tool to list installed components

By: Mohammed Moinudheen | Updated: 2016-02-29 | Comments (4) | Related: More > Database Administration

Problem

I would like to get a detailed report of all the SQL Server components that are installed on the local server. Is there any easy way by which I could get this done?

Solution

Starting with SQL Server 2008, there is a built-in tool that can be used to get all the components that are installed on the local server. There are two ways by which the report can be generated. Check out the below options.

Option 1: SQL Server Installation Center

On the local server, click on "Start" and use the "Search" option.

In the search box enter sql server to find installed programs related to SQL Server and then select the version of the installation center you want to run, in our case it is SQL Server 2016 CTP3.0 Installation Center (64-bit) as shown below.

From SQL Server Installation Center, click on "Tools" on the left and click on "Installed SQL Server features discovery report" as shown below.

A detailed report which has information of all the SQL Server related components gets generated as shown below. As you can see, this report shows all the SQL Server components that are installed on the local server. (Note: there are additional columns, but to make the image readable I left off the last few columns from the report)

Option 2: Using command prompt

Go to the SQL installation folder from where you installed SQL Server. In my case, it is this folder: C:\SQLServer_13.0_Full.

Once you have navigated to this folder on the command prompt, enter this command : Setup.exe /Action=RunDiscovery

A new window will appear and once it completes you will see the final report as displayed above.

With this, you can easily collect the details of all the SQL Server components that are installed on your server.

Next Steps

If you are looking to collect information remotely across multiple servers, refer to this tip using the MAP toolkit
Check out this tip to see what version of SQL Server is installed

About the author

Mohammed Moinudheen is a SQL Server DBA with over 6 years experience managing production databases for a few Fortune 500 companies.

This author pledges the content of this article is based on professional experience and not AI generated.

View all my tips

Article Last Updated: 2016-02-29

Comments For This Article

Tuesday, March 1, 2016 - 4:41:04 PM - mohammed

Thanks jeff

Monday, February 29, 2016 - 7:21:26 PM - jeff_yao

An alternative way (pretty slow but it works) with PowerShell

Get-WmiObject -computer localhost -Class Win32_Product -Filter "Name LIKE '%SQL%'" | select __server, name, version | Sort-Object -property name, version -Unique;

The pro (or con) here is that if you have multipe version sql server components installed here, it will list all of them. If you really want to list of a specific version, then you need to revise the filter to get what you want.

Monday, February 29, 2016 - 1:19:03 PM - mohammed	Back To Top (40819)
This can be used only locally. For fetching info for all servers, we need to use scripts

Monday, February 29, 2016 - 12:44:39 PM - Anne

Nice tip.

This is for single server. Is there a built-in tools to find out for all the servers ?

Thanks,