Grafana vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Grafana
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$0
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Score 5.7 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) enables deep visibility into database performance and expert advice for performance optimization and tuning. What can you monitor with DPA? Oracle Oracle Exadata Oracle EBS Microsoft SQL Server Azure SQL Database Azure SQL Database Managed Instance MySQL DB2 SAP ASE Aurora MariaDB DPA monitors physical, virtual,…N/A
Pricing
GrafanaSolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Editions & Modules
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GrafanaSolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GrafanaSolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Features
GrafanaSolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.2
7 Ratings
2% above category average
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
-
Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports7.97 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards8.57 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.47 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.0
6 Ratings
3% above category average
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
-
Ratings
Drill-down analysis7.96 Ratings00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages7.66 Ratings00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.05 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.4
6 Ratings
3% above category average
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
-
Ratings
Publish to Web8.16 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF8.66 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Versioning8.36 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers8.66 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Grafana
8.6
6 Ratings
10% above category average
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
-
Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.66 Ratings00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.06 Ratings00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics8.56 Ratings00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining8.34 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GrafanaSolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Small Businesses
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.8 out of 10

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Medium-sized Companies
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.8 out of 10
LogicMonitor
LogicMonitor
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Analytics Engine
IBM Analytics Engine
Score 7.2 out of 10
LogicMonitor
LogicMonitor
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GrafanaSolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Likelihood to Recommend
9.4
(7 ratings)
8.9
(113 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(4 ratings)
Usability
9.6
(3 ratings)
9.0
(6 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(6 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(2 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
GrafanaSolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Likelihood to Recommend
Grafana Labs
Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation
Read full review
SolarWinds
This is an easy 10 because I actually have recommended this product to multiple clients and colleagues! Any shop that writes its own SQL queries will benefit from the insight provided by SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer, so they know which of their queries is causing a bottleneck. Small shops or databases with only a few tables likely will see far fewer opportunities for optimization.
Read full review
Pros
Grafana Labs
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • Maintains historical SQL execution data, enabling forensic analysis
  • Has the ability to slice and dice the data so that you can drill down to the execution of a single SQL statement being executed by a stored procedure
  • Alerts to when the consumption pattern changes
  • Shows historical average run times against the current, illustrating problems when they arise
  • Provides tuning advice based on best practices
Read full review
Cons
Grafana Labs
  • There are some settings which we can't configure from UI (Web Console).
  • We've open[ed] up configuration files in command line text editors and manually do the settings e.g. LDAP/SSO configuration.
  • In terms of visualization, it's best, but it doesn't support log analysis otherwise it could destroy business of all other visualization tools.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • Alerts seem to be lacking in DPA compared to competitor's tools. They can be setup but are not quite as easy or as helpful as some other tools I have used.
  • Grooming/pruning the repository database isn't very easy. We don't manage a lot of instances but our repo DB has grown pretty significantly.
  • At times when I am drilled-down to a chart, it can be difficult to navigate around from that point to another time range/query/metric.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
We have relied on this product for a very long time and it continues to exceed expectations. The product is a vital part of our organization at this point, it would not be very ideal for us to abandon it. We use it almost every day and depend on its alerts for critical parts of our business
Read full review
Usability
Grafana Labs
It is infinitely flexible. If you can imagine it, Grafana can almost certainly do it. Usability may be in the eye of the beholder however, as there is time needed to curate the experience and get the dashboards customized to how it makes sense to you. I know one thing they are working on are more templates, based on data sources
Read full review
SolarWinds
I don't want to think about managing clusters of SQL servers in the future without this tool. We have demoed other tools and SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is the gold standard for usability and insight into what your servers are doing. The UI is a bit dated, but everything is laid out in a logical manner and drilling down into queries or timeslices is extremely intuitive.
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Support Rating
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
I have had to use their support on a few occasions, for reasons that I am not clear about until recently I have always had problems upgrading the software (although the last 2 updates have gone without issue which I am very pleased to say). On those unfortunate occasions, the support has been brilliant with either excellently documented guides on how to resolve the issue by myself or have been hands-on with calls and screen sharing to remotely fix the issue. Every time the problem was sorted and more importantly, nothing was lost (apart from a bit of time). And as I stated above whatever the problem was that was causing my upgrade issues appears to have been resolved in the last 2 updates.
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Implementation Rating
Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
Follow the guidelines for the capacity of the servers. We found that the DPA databases were getting rather large and also that there are ways to reduce their size built into some of the options.
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Alternatives Considered
Grafana Labs
Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.
Read full review
SolarWinds
At the time, we found SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer to be easier to setup and to have a richer feature set than Redgate SQL Monitor, plus, from what I remember, the DPA pricing worked better for us over the course of a year. We're very happy with all the features DPA has to offer.
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Return on Investment
Grafana Labs
  • Grafana has replaced many higher priced tools
  • The integrations are seemless with multiple backends
  • Combining graphs and dashboards from multiple data sources is a game changer
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • It has allowed us to progress as an organization with much less reliance on a direct DBA than would traditionally be required
  • Allowed us to be much more proactive in our performance monitoring and responding to issues that would affect users.
Read full review
ScreenShots

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Screenshots

Screenshot of DashboardScreenshot of Alerts and reportsScreenshot of Application-centric view of DPAScreenshot of Blocking deadlock analysisScreenshot of Collaboration across teamsScreenshot of Intuitive performance monitoring