Happy customers, much time saved
June 28, 2019

Happy customers, much time saved

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Even though I would consider myself as highly skilled in SQL Server, I found we were spending a lot of our time trying to detect and analyse database performance issues, with varied success. SolarWinds DPA allowed us to almost forget about that entirely, and let us concentrate on the more interesting day to day stuff, sending us emails when things went a bit crazy, and displaying graphs of current activity, which we put on large screens so we can keep half an eye on what's going on.
  • Detecting blocking
  • Showing missing index information
  • Highlighting the most expensive queries being run in your system
  • Giving a daily summary of issues
  • Showing performance history over a long period of time
  • The GUI is a little clunky, could do with updating and make it responsive
  • A mobile app would be great, to keep an eye on things on the go
  • Perhaps a cut-down version, as sometimes there's just TOO much information!
  • It saves hours of manual work, looking for performance issues
  • If a stored procedure or UDF suddenly starts misbehaving, you can find it instantly
  • We now spend very little time on DBA, and much more on creating new functionality and progressing the business
At the time, we found SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer to be easier to setup and to have a richer feature set than Redgate SQL Monitor, plus, from what I remember, the DPA pricing worked better for us over the course of a year. We're very happy with all the features DPA has to offer.
For discovering performance bottlenecks, SolarWinds is absolutely invaluable. Once it's installed (which is a simple process) it completely looks after itself. Finding the blocking process can be a real headache in pure SQL, grabbing process IDs and checking manually up the chain until you find the root process - by which time it's often stopped blocking! SolarWinds does this for you without thinking.