Catchpoint is an Internet Resilience solution offering services for retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs that help increase their resilience by catching any issues in the Intenet Stack before they impact their business.
$10,000
per year
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Score 10.0 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
Catchpoint
SolarWinds 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
Catchpoint
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
- White glove migration services
- Annual subscription
- Professional Services
- Competitive Benchmarking
I like the synthetic test feature it has from the edge which mimics the real user - that for me is one of the best features. The certificate expiration, the API monitoring, the slowness breakdown to show where the slowdown happens, and more.
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.
Our standard operating material documents Catchpoint’s breadth on HTTP/Browser, API, Streaming, DNS, FTP, TCP, SMTP, Ping, Traceroute, SSH with content validation and custom widgets/dashboards. This gives SREs and L0/L1 a single place to validate both page flows and the underlying network/application protocols.
Product runbooks use Catchpoint to validate critical steps (for ex, login, overview dashboard, unit dashboards) and to detect DNS issues that break those journeys. so we catch experience regressions even when the backend looks healthy.
We’ve standardized Catchpoint alert categories/templates with ITSM so L0 includes the right analysis in handoffs. This tightened “first message, best message” during incidents.
Our operating procedures use Catchpoint for alwayson availability checks with email notifications and multi‑location verification when a site is down. This is useful for unambiguous “is it up/where is it failing” signals.
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.
Missing Functionality: For our organisation, we use multiple observability tools and what we miss in Catchpoint is its ability to display a list of muted monitors in the dashboard. This was a business requirement for our company where the business wanted to know at any given point of time, a list of monitors that were muted during an outage or a scheduled maintenance. This feature was unavailable in Catchpoint, however, we hope to see some enhancements in the future.
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.
The Catchpoint tool has now become an integral part of our DevOps toolkit due to its extensive range of capabilities, including application performance monitoring, network health tracking, DNS visibility, and edge performance analysis. Its seamless integration with our existing monitoring infrastructure has significantly enhanced our ability to detect potential issues proactively, analyze root causes in real time, and resolve incidents much faster, ultimately improving overall system reliability and user experience.
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
It's hard to find the functionalities that I am looking for in the application. Even if I did something in the past, after a time I have to re-learn again where the functionalities are. This is a powerful tool, but not user-friendly. Texts in the buttons and menus are not always meaningful or easily comprehensible.
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.
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.
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
The customer support is fantastic as they keep you updated and follow up even though we may not even follow up. Make sure they send a communication so that we remain updated. They value engineers who will get on a call with you to understand any requirement we have on any test, and they bring in the best developers on call.
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.
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).
Smart Bear Foglight Dynatrace CEM Catchpoint: I have used many synthetic monitoring products. Honestly, there are no big differences in features among all the products listed above or that I have used before. Probably, price and support might play big roles in selecting the products. I do not know the prices of these products.
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.
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.
Catchpoint is not the only monitoring tool we use for our web properties. The test alerts raised by Catchpoint serves as a confirmation of possible outages/problems with an application. This has helped to reduce false-positive alerts thus improving the response of the operations team; they don't have spend time chasing ghosts
The unlimited scheduled tests we can run on the enterprise nodes has been a very cost effective solution compared to similar web monitoring tools
The ability to quickly dive into the test result details help to get to the root cause of a test failure quickly
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
