If you are asking yourself that, you are administering SQL Server 2016 network or services for the first time, or found some dusty old instance that should be decommissioned. In the latter case you are looking for Enterprise Manager, and perhaps someone to accept responsibility for the change control request.

In the case of 2016 you may not have noticed but its where it has always been.

“What? No it’s not. I looked in the SQL Server folder of the start menu.” you say.

Ok. It’s not there but it is still a snap-in for Microsoft Management Console (MMC).

If you never knew that there was a such thing as MMC, you only need a few quick steps to get up and running.

First, you press the Windows key on you keyboard. If you are unfortunate enough to not have one of those you click the start menu.

Next you type MMC. If you notice that a familiar little icon of a toolbox on a window didn’t appear but instead it you highlighted something starting with the letter M, then something else, then perhaps something starting with a C, you might want to think about Windows end of support dates. For now, click run, and then type MMC.

In either case you should be able to launch the MMC.exe console.

Unless, someone configured it for you, the console is going to be this rather uninteresting window:

If you open the file menu and select add/remove snap-in…. (CTRL+M for keyboardists), you will be presented with the Add or Remove Snap-ins dialog.

From there you can scroll down to SQL Server Configuration Manager. Click add. Click Ok. And now you have SQL Server Configuration Manager.

As you may have guessed you can add other useful snap-ins  like (Performance Monitor, Disk Management, Event Viewer, Services, WMI Control, ADUC, RSAT, or Computer/Server Management).

In case you missed it, while we were adding all those cool snap-ins most of which are  part of Computer/Server Management, you can select the local computer or a remote server.

If you like that you can save the console and give it a name. You can also configure folders to hold different groups of servers. You can also create favorites and organize the relationships between the snap-ins to allow you to drill down through common troubleshooting steps. For example you might like to see a performance monitor snap-in configured to view IO related counters as a child of disk management.

MMC is great tool. Now you have to use it. Try and enjoy.