CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued) vs. Redgate SQL Monitor

It's a decent system if you're a pure IT shop and want to become ITIL-aligned. It forces everyone into an ITIL mentality - service level agreements, change management, and asset tracking. It's very rote, for better and for worse. It's not appropriate at all as a customer-facing or non-IT facing self-service tool. You will never get your end users to really understand how to use the interface.

Incentivized

Redgate SQL Monitor is well suited for database administrators or companies who implement software that relies on SQL servers. It will help them test new changes and ensure this will not impact the performance of their software. It is a last resort for MSPs to use to get to the bottom of an ongoing performance issue with their SQL server.

Incentivized

• ITIL ticketing (incidents, problems, etc.).
• Change orders.
• Matching up its asset management system with incidents/change orders.

Incentivized

• It will tell you if your server is under attack.
• You can quickly see how your server is performing and which queries are taking the longest
• I gives you the feeling that you are in control of your database, that you know what is going on for when they users ring up and tell you that the server is slow

Incentivized

• The user interface (UX) is antiquated and clunky. Compared to ServiceNow, it feels like it's 15 years behind.
• It's complicated - We do routine internal training just to get people to use it correctly.
• It doesn't have an automated way of discovering assets. Everything has to be force-fed.

Incentivized

• Incremental releases can be buggy
• Isn't the best for pinpointing performance issues
• Web interface can be sluggish

Incentivized

Access to metrics is simple but I like easy access to top SQL

We have to hire 2 full-time 3rd-party consultants to run this application. That tells me it's not a very IT-friendly, vendor-supported application. Compare that with, say, SolarWinds, which is much easier for regular IT staff to customize without sacrificing features and capability. Sure, we have to bring in Loop1 to consult for us when we need to do a major SolarWinds config change or need a really unusual custom query built, but we never need more than 10 hours of consulting per month.

Incentivized

Fast support responses from Redgate

Incentivized

I did not select CA. If it were up to me, I would migrate us to ServiceNow. The user interface on ServiceNow is 100% more modern and 200% more user friendly. With ServiceNow, the front page for end users makes it clear: one button that says "Ask for something" and one button that says "Report a problem". That's what our end users need. The biggest problem we have in our organization is that our end users don't report issues to the Help Desk often enough and rarely ask for things through the Help Desk. A clean, simple self-service option like this would open up a world of new information for our customer service team.

Incentivized

Redgate SQL Monitor is a lot cheaper than SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer. I prefer the SolarWinds' design and that it offers integration with other SolarWinds products we already use. SolarWinds supports more than SQL servers (Oracle, MySQL, Maria DB, IBM DB2) and the analysis seems to be much better. The Spiceworks SQL Server monitoring is a free tool and is ideal for monitoring small business SQL instances.

Incentivized

• It helped make us an ITIL shop.
• It was integral during our large IT consolidation 10 years ago in merging 10 different IT departments into one by converging on one ticketing system for all IT issues.
• Its lack of user-friendliness has gated us from being able to deploy a true self-service IT help desk.

Incentivized

• The quality of the product and give a negative investment impression, on the plus side when it does work it is a god send.
• Day to day tasks as made simpler, and a feeling of security of realised. Just don't change anything.

Incentivized