A few months ago, I was helping a customer with some performance issues. The lead architect there ask me a question about getting Kerberos delegation for SSRS to work with managed service accounts. Wow! I really wasn’t ready for that question!

Kerberos delegation was out of scope for the work I was doing, but I realized that I needed to devote some time to learn about it. This was not the first time I had run into Kerberos issues, either for customers or in my own testing lab domain. I even attended a session at a SQL Saturday on Kerberos a couple of years ago and left the session knowing not much more about it than when I went in. I decided to spend a day figuring this out, and, luckily, I already had a test lab for Availability Groups set up that I could use.

My dedicated Kerberos day turned into a full weekend as I struggled to figure things out. I probably read a dozen articles, not one of them telling me everything I needed to know or explaining things very well. Once I got Kerberos delegation working, I realized that configuring it is not that difficult. Why did I need to read a dozen articles?

Kerberos Delegation is an important security topic for DBAs managing SSRS, yet most avoid it if at all possible. During the weekend I spent figuring out Kerberos, I had a great idea. Why not create a Pluralsight course on the topic? So, thanks to my struggles, I have released a new Pluralsight course: Configuring Kerberos for SSRS. It covers both native mode and SharePoint mode. It also has a module devoted to managed service accounts. Like everything I do, I have applied the Aunt Kathi touch to this course. If Kerberos delegation is something you need to learn, please check out my course.