Foglight vs. SolarWinds SQL Sentry

It really depends on why my colleague is evaluating Foglight. If it is for Database monitoring and management, I highly recommend it. If it is for anything else, I would encourage them to look at others in this space.

Incentivized

Of all the tools I've used, SolarWinds SQL Sentry's Top Query has been the single most helpful tool in helping me identify which queries are putting a load on our servers and at what times. This greatly simplifies my job in prioritizing tuning. Having Plan Explorer directly linked to the tool is icing on the cake.

Incentivized

• VMWare Monitoring
• Custom use of scripts and dashboard
• Performance Analysis for Database
• Remote Monitoring for Linux and Windows.

Incentivized

• Alerting is very flexible and configurable to our needs
• Linking alerting into third party alerting tools via PowerShell was easy
• Collecting and rolling up SQL statements make it much easier to troubleshoot performance problems
• Drilling into PLE and what’s happening when it drops out
• Ease of drilling into time-frame to figure out what was the issue at that time
• Being able to query the SentryOne database for management reports is awesome (Deadlocks and Blocking)

• Foglight allows detecting and diagnosing performance problems simplifying hybrid environments, it is a solution that has perfect features which work in a flexible and intuitive way, it allows database performance in a safe and fast way. It works perfectly with nothing else to add.

Incentivized

• It would be nice if the reports can be interactive like drill down, clickable content, etc.
• Navigation could improve and become more intuitive.
• Calendar of events could also improve - wish the date and time range could be specified instead of just by day or interval.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I don't know how we survived before without this tool, the added value that you get from it to do deep dive performance analysis, reactive problem solving and proactive monitoring and alerting is limitless. We have only scratched the surface of what we can do with this tool at my company. The support and ROI that SentryOne provide is exceptional and one of my favourite vendors to deal with.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The main platform is very well supported. Requests for help with customizing alerts and monitors have been rapidly and thoroughly responded to. Our use of the chain feature seems to be out of the ordinary and our defect reports there while understood and taken seriously, tend to be lower priority than defects in the main platform. They will work diligently to give us a workaround but correction in the standard release is a little slower in the chain feature.

Incentivized

sql sentry expert came onsight to review the performance of installation and gave us a good insight to using the tool

Incentivized

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).

Incentivized

Foglight was chosen years ago as a replacement for Groundwork. After 2.5 years of implementing Groundwork things were still not complete and the decision to go with a more formalized solution was made. Foglight installed easily and quickly nearly across the board and the full implementation for complex infrastructure was completed (with no Professional Services) by us in under 4 months. Nagios is a wonderful toolkit but you have to be ready to build what you need. It's flexibility and breadth are excellent features but with that comes the need to define things very tightly lest you embark on the project that never ends (see above about Groundwork). Dynatrace is an excellent APM tool and has advanced analytics but as a general infrastructure monitoring tool it is actually very expensive and to be honest does not have the same focus and full feature set that it does on it's APM (which to be fair is it's wheelhouse). vROPs (we also have) is a wonderful tool but focused (and rightly so) on satisfying the VMware engineers in the crowd and doesn't put itself out there too far to make things palatable for the non-engineering crowd.

Incentivized

SQL Sentry has a LOT more information in it than the SolarWinds DPA product. Its reporting tool isn't as good either. The IDERA product isn't as reliable as SQL Sentry and its reporting isn't nearly as good. The IDERA UI is a resource hog and isn't as intuitive.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Positive - near instant alerts help combat potential problems quickly
• Positive - minimizes business interruption
• Positive - limits disruptions to productivity

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized