Get from sign-up to live dashboard in under 5 minutes

This guide walks you through connecting your first SQL Server to Mafadi Studio — then everything that comes after: your team, your first schema compare, multi-server scripts, and the audit log.

Just signed up? Jump straight to Step 1 — Create your account. The full guide below covers workspaces, teams, schema compare, and scripts for when you're ready.

What you'll need

  • A Mafadi Studio account — Sign up free → (no credit card required)
  • A Windows machine that can reach your SQL Server over the network (can be the SQL Server machine itself, but a separate utility server or VM is recommended)
  • Outbound internet access from that Windows machine on port 443 (HTTPS)
  • A SQL Server login with sysadmin rights (for the initial Prepare Database script)
  • SQL Server 2016 SP1 or later
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Step 1 — Create your account

Head to app.mafadistudio.com/sign-up and create your account. No credit card required. Your 14-day free trial begins immediately and gives you full access to the Standard plan (with 20 AI analyses included).

Create your free account →

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Step 2 — Add your first server

Once logged in, click Add Server in your dashboard. Give your server a display name — this is how it will appear in your dashboards and alerts. At this step you will be shown your Prepare Database script, your agent token, and your agent download link.

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Step 3 — Run the Prepare Database script

The Prepare Database script creates a dedicated SQL login that the agent uses for monitoring. Open it in SSMS or any SQL client connected with sysadmin rights, review every line, and run it on your SQL Server.

The script shows you exactly what permissions it grants before you run it. For tighter control, you can configure two logins: a read-only login for monitoring, and an optional second login for script execution — so the monitoring login can never write anything.

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Step 4 — Install the MafadiStudio Agent

The agent is a single .exe — no installer, no .NET runtime required. Download it from your Mafadi Studio dashboard after adding your server (you must be logged in).

Log in to download the agent →

Once downloaded, open a Command Prompt as Administrator in the folder containing the exe, and run:

MafadiAgent.exe setup ^
  --url https://app.mafadistudio.com ^
  --token <your-agent-token>
MafadiAgent.exe install
net start "MafadiStudio Agent"

The setup command prompts for your SQL Server connection details and tests the connection before saving. Your credentials are encrypted locally using Windows DPAPI and never leave your machine. The service starts automatically after every reboot.

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Step 5 — Watch it come online

Within 60 seconds of starting the agent, your server will appear as online in your Mafadi Studio dashboard. Database discovery runs automatically, and metrics begin flowing immediately.

Click any card on your dashboard to drill into details, or click Investigate with AI to get an instant health analysis of your server.

Understanding workspaces

A workspace is the container everything in Mafadi Studio lives in: servers, dashboards, comparisons, scripts, and team members all belong to a workspace. Your first workspace is created automatically when you sign up.

You can create additional workspaces from the Workspace page, and switch between them at any time — each one is fully separated from the others. Common ways teams use them:

  • By client — consultants and managed service providers keep each client's servers, scripts, and history in its own workspace, cleanly separated.
  • By environment or team — for example a workspace for the core estate and another for a project team that should only see its own servers.

Access is per workspace: every member has a role in each workspace they belong to, and the same person can be an Admin in one workspace and a Viewer in another. Someone who isn't a member of a workspace cannot see anything in it — not the servers, not the dashboards, not the history.

The Free plan includes 1 workspace. Standard and Enterprise include unlimited workspaces.

Invite your team and configure role-based access

Go to Users → Add User. Enter the person's email address, tick the workspace(s) they should have access to, and choose a role for each workspace. Mafadi Studio then generates an invite link — no email is sent automatically, so you share the link with them yourself (chat, email, however you like). They follow it, create their account, and land in the right workspace with the right role.

There are five roles, from most to least access:

  • Owner — the account creator. Everything an Admin can do, plus billing and subscription management.
  • Admin — full access except billing: dashboards, compares, AI insights, scripts, plus managing servers and adding or removing members.
  • Member — day-to-day work: dashboards, schema/data compares, AI insights, and running scripts. Cannot manage members, servers, or billing.
  • Analyst — read & analyse: dashboards, compares, and AI insights. Cannot run scripts or change anything.
  • Viewer — read-only: dashboards only. No compare, AI, scripts, or management.

A practical pattern: give DBAs Member, give developers or support staff Analyst so they can investigate without being able to execute anything, and reserve Admin for the people who manage servers and the team itself.

On paid plans each user needs a seat. If you add someone beyond your current seat count, Mafadi Studio asks you to confirm the extra seat before the invite is created — no surprise charges.

Run your first schema compare between dev and production

Open Schema Compare and start a new comparison: pick a source server and database (for example, dev) and a target server and database (for example, production). The comparison runs through your agents — the servers never need to see each other, and they can even sit in different networks.

Results appear as a tree of differences grouped by object type — tables, views, stored procedures, functions, and more. Click any object to see a side-by-side diff, source on the left, target on the right, with the exact lines that differ highlighted. Filters let you narrow the view to just the object types you care about.

When you're ready to reconcile, generate the sync script — it's dependency-aware, so objects are created and altered in an order that actually runs. Review it before executing; nothing is ever applied to a target without you explicitly running it.

Comparison results pass through Mafadi's servers in memory only and are not stored. Your comparison history (what was compared and when) is kept so you can re-run it later.

Set up a multi-server script

Open Scripts. Write or paste your T-SQL in the editor, then use the targets panel to tick the servers and databases it should run against — one database or hundreds, across any number of servers in the workspace.

Run it once, and results come back per target into a single grid: rows returned, rows affected, duration, and any errors, per database. No more repeating the same script across a dozen SSMS windows and eyeballing the output.

Safety is built in at several layers: destructive statements (DROP, TRUNCATE, DELETE or UPDATE without a WHERE clause) are flagged before you run, the AI preflight can review a script before it touches anything, and if a batch fails on a target, any open transaction on that target is rolled back and the remaining batches are stopped rather than half-applied. If a script errors, click AI Explanation to get the cause and a suggested fix.

Scripts can be saved and shared within the workspace, and every execution is recorded — who ran what, against which servers, with what result.

Running scripts requires the Member role or higher. Analysts and Viewers cannot execute scripts, by design.

Review your audit log

The Audit page answers the question every compliance review asks: who did what, where, and when. Script executions, schema and data comparisons, and team changes are logged with the user, the affected servers, and the outcome.

The overview shows total events and active users at a glance, with per-user activity breakdowns — useful for client reporting if you manage environments for others, and for spotting anything unusual early.

Because access is role-based and every consequential action lands in the audit log, you can give a whole team access to production monitoring without losing the answer to "who changed this?"

Need help?

If you hit a problem at any step, email us at hello@mafadistudio.com. We respond within one business day and are happy to help with firewall configurations, agent setup, and SQL permission questions.