Likelihood to Recommend As any other archiving solution, it is very well suited for environments with a large footprint of unstructured data (CIFS / NFS shares for user data) with a large amount of unused/old files and a need to keep those unused files for long term. In our scenario, due to some legal and contractual constraints we need to keep these files for 15 years. Archiving is a good choice to move the unused files to a cheaper storage tier, both on-prem or cloud.
Read full review 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 It gives you a good overview on user data: files age, sizes, file types, owners, etc. It is very flexible on the archiving policies. The data scans are really fast without affecting storage's performance. It has a great alternative to STUB files, which they call 'bread crumbs' (symlinks to files). Read full review 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 Its licensing plan, which takes into account the amount of data analyzed instead of data transferred. Read full review 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 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 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We have used
Veritas Enterprise Vault in the past, and besides its being a well-known player on the data archiving market, their tool is far more complex to implement, to manage and to keep working. Komprise is very robust and also very easy to implement, as most part of the job is done on Komprise side. The management console is delivered through a public URL as a SaaS platform. You only need to deploy a few VMs for scan/archiving/user access, which they call "Observer VMs." Komprise also doesn't uses Stub files, which is a poor implementation adopted by the competitor for file access. We had a lot of issues in the past with stub files. Komprise has implemented 'bread crumbs', which are CIFS symlinks to the files on the Observer. It is a very good implementation and it works really well.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment It allowed us to free up some space on our main storage during a time where we didn't have the budget to expand it. It allows us to move unused data to a cheaper storage tier (Azure Blobs). Read full review 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