AppDynamics vs. SolarWinds SQL Sentry

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AppDynamics
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
AppDynamics is an APM and Mobile APM program, with application mapping and predictive capabilities. These capacities enable automated remediation and code-level diagnostics in real time. It can be deployed on-premise or as a SaaS.N/A
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds SQL Sentry is designed to help data professionals optimize SQL Server database performance in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. SQL Sentry delivers metrics to help users find and fix database performance problems and provides scalability, boasting demonstrated success monitoring 800+ SQL Server instances with one monitoring database. With SQL Sentry, the user can monitor: SQL Server Azure SQL Database SQL Server Analysis…
$0
Free
Pricing
AppDynamicsSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Plan Explorer (SQL Server Query Tuning)
$0
Free
SQL Sentry for Azure SQL Database
$161
Per year per database (annual subscription)
SQL Sentry
1,450
Per year per instance (annual subscription)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AppDynamicsSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AppDynamicsSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Considered Both Products
AppDynamics

No answer on this topic

SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
  • Zoom in for deep dive on any spike of resources
  • Professional dashboard with coverage of OS and DB components in one page.
  • Ease in creating a baseline.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
AppDynamicsSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Application Performance Management
Comparison of Application Performance Management features of Product A and Product B
AppDynamics
8.4
46 Ratings
8% above category average
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
-
Ratings
Application monitoring9.346 Ratings00 Ratings
Database monitoring7.745 Ratings00 Ratings
Threshold alerts9.145 Ratings00 Ratings
Predictive capabilities7.544 Ratings00 Ratings
Application performance management console8.844 Ratings00 Ratings
Collaboration tools7.935 Ratings00 Ratings
Server availability and performance monitoring8.417 Ratings00 Ratings
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting8.616 Ratings00 Ratings
SQL Performance Monitoring
Comparison of SQL Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
AppDynamics
-
Ratings
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
8.4
102 Ratings
2% below category average
Performance dashboard00 Ratings9.2102 Ratings
Intelligent alerting00 Ratings8.096 Ratings
Top SQL00 Ratings8.6102 Ratings
Historical trend data00 Ratings8.6100 Ratings
Virtualization support00 Ratings8.764 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AppDynamicsSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Small Businesses
GitLab
GitLab
Score 9.0 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
Score 9.1 out of 10
Redgate SQL Monitor
Redgate SQL Monitor
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
Score 9.1 out of 10
Redgate SQL Monitor
Redgate SQL Monitor
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AppDynamicsSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(46 ratings)
8.7
(102 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(2 ratings)
8.8
(16 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(12 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
7.1
(4 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.1
(4 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(12 ratings)
7.6
(20 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(18 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
7.9
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
AppDynamicsSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
AppDynamics is well suited to large IT organizations ie telcos where there is legacy combined with modern systems ie containerized environments and cloud deployments, mobile, web as well as onprem. AppDynamics can follow the transactions into all of these areas and provide a single view on the health of the systems.
Read full review
SolarWinds
This solution is perfect for a team with a large server count and, at least, moderate experience supporting a SQL Server environment. If the environment is smaller or the team has less experience working with SQL Server performance tuning methodologies, then the tool may be overwhelming for the users.
Read full review
Pros
Cisco
  • you can easily identify where there is a problem in the code at the time of error.
  • With Network Visibility, you can see how much bandwidth your applications are using between nodes.
  • You can easily detect SQL statements or stored procedures that consume most of the system resources and get statistical data.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • The Top SQL functionality has been extremely useful for identifying poorly performing queries by resource consumption.
  • The flexibility of creating your own Advisory Conditions has allowed us to integrate our custom internal alerts into a centralized dashboard and alerting platform.
  • Being able to highlight any chart on the dashboard and then tool-matching that window across all the other charts makes it much easier to correlate the different performance metrics against each other.
Read full review
Cons
Cisco
  • Data Privacy is the most concerning thing with AppDynamics and the SSO authentication is very limited
  • During load testing the graph output is not as expected and delayed
  • Sometime Server details in the portal is missing in real time, which can indeed cause issue in long term and during performance tracking
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • Tuning advice: With all the graphs and data available, it's not always easy to determine the best thing to do. I'd like to see SentryOne provide some best practice analysis based on the historical information collected for the server being looked at.
  • They could add help tips or links to help documents, when you select a graph on the dashboard. Inexperienced users tend to put blinders on and focus on one thing when they see a high counter or something out of the ordinary. It would be very useful to include a link that provides underlying help. The link would provide an explanation of the counter in detail and offer possible explanations as to why the counter is off.
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Likelihood to Renew
Cisco
its working for us, we are familiar and comfortable with the tool and its proven valuable/indispensable in helping evaluate our code.
Read full review
SolarWinds
Absolutely. SQL Sentry is an absolute must have for any company with a SQL Server estate. It provides a force multiplier to effectively manage SQL Server, and the feature sets are second to none. The support and expertise at SentryOne is incredible. They are very supportive of both the platform users and helping your business with the product
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Usability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
I accept that the flexibility of the alerting comes at a price. Other than the alerting SQL Sentry's interface is intuitive. Connecting to a new SQL instance, given that all the needed ports are open in your firewalls is straight forward. Reviewing the performance and queries for an instance is available in with a right click. As you dig in new tabs are created to present the detailed data. I find the ability to filter and rollup metrics on a query very helpful in dealing with the "it's running slow". You can easily compare the metrics of run times for the same query to let the user know, it's probably data your doing a billion reads instead of the usual 100 thousand.
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Reliability and Availability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
The system is working perfectly in capturing data, but we do experience issues with SQL Timeout when viewing results in the remote clients. This may be due to the fact that our monitoring service is consuming most of the CPU, and it is the same server that is hosting the SQL Repository. We could probably fix the issue by separating the SQL instance from the monitoring service.
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Performance
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
In most cases the pages load very quickly. In our particular case, we need to do some movement of services to separate our monitoring service to separate infrastructure from the repository. When we first started with SQL Sentry on 5 licenses, we did not have any issues. Since we have now grown that to 25, we are experiencing some challenges. We do not believe this to be a tool problem
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Support Rating
Cisco
AppDynamics has its own community site that includes forums and a knowledge base. On the forums, you can converse with other members of the community and ask technical questions as you have them. Though this forum isn’t filled with people there are active members for you to gain some valuable insights.
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SolarWinds
From their infancy as a smaller company to now as a global player they have always kept focus on prioritising he customer. They know their product and the technology it supports and are easily accessible for both resolving problems with the product all the way to adding value through additional training and assisting with getting return on investment through utilisation of the many features the product provides.
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In-Person Training
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
sql sentry expert came onsight to review the performance of installation and gave us a good insight to using the tool
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Implementation Rating
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
Was suggested that we install the process monitors on a dev or qa database server, but we found it more useful to create an IT db server and put it there (along with a few other apps that we use for monitoring).
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Alternatives Considered
Cisco
I have worked on many Cisco applications and I am very much positive about support from Cisco. The same type of support reputation has been maintained by Cisco in the case of AppDynamics, too. The AppDynamics suite itself is a very trustworthy monitoring application that I have seen, and I like the response sync time w.r.t. downtime when it occurs.
Read full review
SolarWinds
SQL Sentry offers more features and is customize-able to fit our business needs. It has more centralized management and support. The company's technical support is also top notch. It is also worth mentioning that SentryOne Team Blog is an excellent source. One can find lots of valuable troubleshooting skills on the blog site - very educational and informational.
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Scalability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
We are running 25 instances through a single monitoring service and it is able to keep up. We are finding that this many instances in our environment is about as many as can be handled. We will need to deploy additional monitoring services. Luckily, there is no additional licensing costs to deploy additional monitoring services. For us, it's just an additional Azure VM.
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Return on Investment
Cisco
  • Platform map drilldown capabilities and code-level visibility helped us to find the root cause of problems faster
  • Threshold alerts made proactive problem handling easier
  • Data capture module helped us to link technical data with business data and support customers far more efficiently
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • Better customer service as it alerts me automatically to loss of service issues so I can react and either get things fixed before it impacts the customers or to let my management know as soon as possible
  • It helps me find expensive SQL so our customers get better performance and we make better use of our resources
Read full review
ScreenShots

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots

Screenshot of SQL Sentry DeadlocksScreenshot of SQL Sentry Top SQL