IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs. SolarWinds Loggly

If you have several SQL servers and don't have a lot of time or resources to constantly monitor them, SQLdm will be very helpful. For one or two servers, it might be overkill. All of our servers are virtual, so having a tool that can monitor host metrics as well as guest metrics is a plus as well.

Incentivized

SolarWinds Loggly is great for capturing and organizing logs from 3rd party sources such as NGINX. Without SolarWinds Loggly it's really difficult to manage the logs overtime, find traffic patterns, and identify issues before they become a problem. Anyone who is routinely searching through massive log files could quickly benefit from the SolarWinds Loggly and it's capabilities.

Incentivized

• Database query optimization.
• Monitoring of databases in real time.
• Performance analysis and trends in the database.

Incentivized

• Putting our logs in one place and making them searchable. We use AWS, and CloudWatch has always been a little frustrating in this regard (though it has gotten better recently).
• Deriving metrics from our logs. I think log-based metrics is such a good idea because your logs are the ultimate source for truth in regards to what the hell is going on inside your app. I have really loved the simplicity with which I can just count certain statements and call that a metric because just through the normal course of development certain log statements just naturally become a straightforward recording of an event having occurred.
• Alerts. I actually have a few complaints about email alerts, but just the way I was able to set them up so easily has been huge. Since we started using Loggly, there have been at least 3 bugs that Loggly exposed that were frankly very bad. And withoutt Loggly or without a user reporting them, we would have never known they were happening! This is stuff I tried to set up in CloudWatch in various ways, but because of my own ignorance or perhaps the complexity/limitations of CloudWatch (or the complexity of my stack?), I wasn't getting the information that I needed until I was able to just tell Loggly to send me an email whenever the word "error" showed up.

Incentivized

• Windows client has some issues. When you have small time intervals for your data collection, it can cause the client to become unresponsive and require you to restart it.
• It takes more time to get the web client running than it does to get the windows client running.
• The visualizations have been the same for the last eight years--could use a little bit of a refresh.

Incentivized

• Not all searches are intuitive.
• We have to use a log aggregating device to ship our logs to Loggly as our network devices can not connect on an encrypted protocol. I would prefer if we could use some sort of VPN-based connector to ship logs securely.
• Sometimes when drilled down, it can be difficult to fully reset a search term to back all the way out of a drill down.

Incentivized

Management is not open to having an agent sending the data to the cloud instance.

Incentivized

Loggly's easy setup, very good customer support, and intuitive interface make Loggly very easy to use. User access management is also very easy as we can tailor the experience for each of our developers to access the information they need without having to wade through other information. While there was a slight learning curve in how to view the logs the way some specifically wanted, everything was possible and quite easy to do.

Incentivized

The support team have been great when we have logged tickets or had issues, most of the time it is down to user training, however we have had a couple of bugs that they have been able to iron out for us.

Incentivized

It has good architecture, which focus on ese of use.

Incentivized

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server is an excellent tool, however I think Solarwinds Database Perfromance Analyzer is a slightly stronger more well rounded product

Incentivized

We were using Zabbix. While it is an open-source solution that you can install for free the following things were limitations of the solution. 1) The scale and uptime of the solution are now your own problem. Since we were hosting at AWS this meant we still had a cost of the AWS solution. 2) The product is complicated from a configuration standpoint. In order to get anything meaningful out of it, you had to invest a lot of time and effort. We did consider NewRelic. I have experience with that product and do think that it is a solid alternative. Ultimately experience with the simplicity and speed of deployment with Loggly encouraged me to suggest using this again.

Incentivized

• It saves me a significant amount of time each week, freeing me up for other important tasks. I couldn't possibly monitor each server individually to the extent that SQLdm does.
• With the wealth of information I can get to easily, I can be more proactive in taking care of my environments rather than reactive. The times when other people notice something happening before I do are few and far between.

Incentivized

• Unfortunately, we hit our logging cap on a weekly basis and we lose logs after that.
• We have lost logs after hitting the maximum during service outages. We have become accustomed to not being able to rely on having them, then things go poorly.

Incentivized