Likelihood to Recommend A Solid product, provides meaningful accurate data results from synthetic monitoring. Catchpoint as a vendor has acted as a reliable business partner and promotes good relationship with customers and provides them with meaningful support. Support engineer and account manager make efforts to maintain helpful relationship for services offered. Been able to work with us to provide input for code changes and enhancements for payload used for synthetics.
Read full review 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 Global Monitoring: Catchpoint offers an extensive network of monitoring locations worldwide, allowing organizations to simulate user experiences from different geographical regions. This capability helps identify performance variations based on location, ensuring a consistent and optimal experience for users across the globe. Alerting and Root Cause Analysis: Catchpoint offers robust alerting mechanisms that notify organizations when performance thresholds are exceeded or anomalies occur. These alerts enable prompt incident response and troubleshooting. Catchpoint's root cause analysis capabilities help identify the underlying causes of performance issues by analyzing network conditions, DNS resolutions, server responses, or content delivery problems. Read full review 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 The ability to monitor the Catchpoint nodes with the ability to setup a take a recovery action based on specific criteria The ability to tell us when we are at X% capacity so that we better plan or budget for increasing the "capacity" of the Catchpoint nodes before we get to an overloaded state. The capacity utilization graph is not a reliable indicator for this metric. How can the capacity utilization rate get above 100%, it does not make sense Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew we are heavily dependent catchpoint system for the following functions * Detect end-user availability/performance-related problems * Ensures service level objectives (SLO) are met, that prevents service level agreement (SLA) breaches * Identify and understand the cause of any network connectivity or application level issue * Improves the availability and response time service levels
Read full review 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
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Performance 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
Read full review Support Rating Catchpoint exceptional service has consistently exceeded my expectations. Their technical expertise, coupled with their timely responses to queries and issues, demonstrates their dedication to customer satisfaction. Additionally, the support team's ability to provide actionable advice and guidance has enabled me to resolve complex problems efficiently and effectively.
Read full review 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.
Read full review In-Person Training sql sentry expert came onsight to review the performance of installation and gave us a good insight to using the tool
Read full review Implementation Rating very easy to implement as the product is user-friendly
Read full review 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).
Read full review Alternatives Considered Primary reason we went with Catchpoint is that they offered us actual backbone testing locations. All the other features like a filmstrip and traceroutes have been very beneficial as well and were not available in the competitors' solutions.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment The ROI has been very good with this product, we have seen multiple folds of time-saving by using this tool and preempting any risk associated with non-performant times of our server, hence increasing the team's capability to respond to certain downtime scenarios and the level of action that needs to be taken. Catchpoint’s observability solution makes it easier to have global visibility of our website's performance and to fix issues quicker I don't have any negatives, every good product comes with a cost, that is the fact but the Catchpoint tool has ultimately improved our ROI much beyond the changes that we pay Read full review 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