BizTalk360 vs. IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager vs. Spotlight

In my experience, BizTalk360 was very helpful when exchanging and directing a Message to Multiple Endpoints including multiple educational platforms. I did not observe any major issues in the latency.

Incentivized

If you have several SQL servers and don't have a lot of time or resources to constantly monitor them, SQLdm will be very helpful. For one or two servers, it might be overkill. All of our servers are virtual, so having a tool that can monitor host metrics as well as guest metrics is a plus as well.

Incentivized

Spotlight is great when you need a tool to give a quick look at a SQL server as a whole. It gives you the ability to see a lot of things, which can be vital in diagnosing problems or identifying stressors. Less great is the open-end of some of the diagnoses it makes, and things it identifies as "problems" (unless you love users coming to you and saying something like "Spotlight says there's a problem with our page latch!!!").

Incentivized

• Information flows.
• Mapping inputs and outputs.
• Connecting various subsystems.

Incentivized

• SQLdm does a good job of providing information at a high level, but also allows me to drill down to specific queries and events if needed. I don't always need to sift through tons of details to get the information I need. It also gives a very wide range of information from SQL specific metrics, to OS metrics, to VM metrics, all the way up to host server metrics.
• I like how the alert and notification system can be customized. For example, if you know a certain server regularly has long-running queries, you can adjust the alert to not fire unless a query has been running for 30 minutes while the rest of the servers fire after 30 seconds. That is very helpful in not being bombarded at dinner with alerts from a server similar to, "I've been at 90% cpu for 26 milliseconds!!!!!!!...and now it's back down to 30%" Good information to know, but not something you need to literally lose sleep over.
• I like how you can configure different servers to be monitored differently. For example, you can have a group of servers called DEVELOPMENT that you can turn on heavier monitoring on so you can test how changes in applications might affect the SQL environment, but in the PRODUCTION group, you may only want to enable the heavier analysis and logging when performance issues are actively being reported.

Incentivized

• The screen is color-coded, so when Red or Orange is displayed you are able to drill down into that setting and figure out what is going on.
• This tool also integrates with the OEM agents which will also have implemented.
• Spotlight also works great without RAC databases, able to view at the cluster level or drill down to instances and VM's.

Incentivized

• It can take some time to figure out the best way to set up notifications.
• At times, it may seem like the dashboard is running slowly, however, this is largely down to the browser being used.
• Because the BizTalk360 interface doesn't appear to be responsive to mobile devices, viewing it has been difficult.

Incentivized

• Windows client has some issues. When you have small time intervals for your data collection, it can cause the client to become unresponsive and require you to restart it.
• It takes more time to get the web client running than it does to get the windows client running.
• The visualizations have been the same for the last eight years--could use a little bit of a refresh.

Incentivized

• Cash Flow analysis could be better, there are many different scenarios to calculate the cash flow but flexibility is not great.
• Incorporating machine learning algorithms for predictive analytics could enhance forecasting accuracy

Incentivized

the platform offers a clean, easy to use interface. You can customize reports and dashboard. Integration is also pretty good, you can integrate to Xero, QBO and MYOB and excel spreadsheets. It also offers very broad supporting documents and webinars. There are only two downside of Spotlight; learning curve (it could be a bit difficult at the beginning to learn the system) and price point (For small businesses, Spotlight Reporting can be seen as relatively expensive compared to other reporting tools)

Incentivized

Though our support needs have been minimal, we have gotten good responses when we have needed it.

Incentivized

In our company, BizTalk360 is used extensively because of its simplicity and the fact that it gives practically everything you need to accomplish routine tasks without the need for a console. Additionally, alarms save a lot of time and keep items on the radar by alerting, monitoring, or a variety of other purposes.

Incentivized

SQL Server [Business Intelligence] Manager works well with Microsoft products. It has several advanced features along with dashboards and alerts that can be configured to user's need.

Incentivized

Spotlight is more usable, better at meeting requirements. Integration with Xero is one of the strengths (as others integrate too but Spotlight seems better connection). We also like the way group consolidation work in Spotlight. If your focus is on comprehensive, flexible, and visually rich reports and dashboards for multiple clients or entities, Spotlight is a clear choice.

Incentivized

• It is possible to automate most of the data monitoring process.
• As a general diagnostic tool, BizTalk360 will tell you what's wrong with your system.
• To detect and correct problems, you don't even have to get inside the system.

Incentivized

• Reduce development hours by locating the queries to be optimized.
• Reduce hardware cost by requiring fewer hardware resources by optimizing database queries.
• Provides a very complete scorecard.

Incentivized

• It had a positive impact in two main areas. First, it was easy for the DBA team to configure it to watch and alert on the most important instances. And second, it was very easy to provide clients read-only access to the dashboard so they could watch their servers as well, i.e. they weren't always pestering us for current status.

Incentivized