New Relic vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

New Relic its an excellent tool for monitoring services used on the SAAS universe, like web servers, relational and nosql dbms, reverse proxies, text databases, etc. Its also a powerful tool to monitor resource usage on said servers. However, its not well fitted to monitor custom services - if you need to generate alerts based on logs or database information, for example

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• It gives us insights of applications, infrastructure, clouds very well.
• The alerting system in New Relic helps us to easily identify the root cause which reduces the MTTR.
• It has new features related to AI which helps to troubleshoot any problem in a very short time it gives future predictions also.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• And while powerful, building tailored dashboards with organ-specific metrics (such as energy load variance across regions) can be difficult to navigate. The UI isn't as drag-and-drop easy, and query-based widgets typically involve some trial and error for non-devs.
• Alerts may be hypersensitive or over general. I We often get a spam of non-critical alerts while doing load testing, all overhauling to me alone and making it difficult to identify actual issues especially in energy systems where spikes are very common.
• With our expanding fleet of Iot devices, the per-host pricing model is becoming expensive, quickly. More detailed billing based on microservices, or that works at sensor level, would make it more adaptable for energy platforms.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

The only issue that we have had with New Relic is that the price might be a little expensive for smaller companies. The amount of data you store in New Relic impacts the cost, and can get away from you if you don't work closely with the vendor. Overall though the application is top notch.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I have given this much rating as I am used New Relic in different sectors and for different use cases like its K8s monitoring, infra monitoring, full stack monitoring as compare to other tools New Relic gives data in a formatted and connected way, and also it is giving us value for money. It also launches new features day by day which helps users to track the issue very quickly. It also supports OTel integrations which is the latest trend of observability tools. thats why I had given this much rating to New Relic.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Never observed an outage

Incentivized

there are times where browser cache will cause issues that require you to clear your browser before continuing.

Incentivized

The support team has been really helpful and resolved most of the issues on time. However, for a couple of issues, several follow-ups were needed to elicit a reasonable response. The issue was deeply technical and could have been investigated only by their Architects, and bringing them into the ticket took longer than needed

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It's better to start by implementing New Relic in one project and test everything. Try to follow best recommended practices and read all the official documentation. Everything seems well tested. Then, start by installing agents to the rest of your projects and keep a close look to all logs and metrics New Relic gives you.

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.

Incentivized

Data Dog has solutions that look more attractive, but not at their price point. We have also tried to build a solution straight from the Cloud, where our business is built, but some things are too hard to replicate. This shows that New Relic is useful and helps our efficiency.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Agent deployment is easily integrated into our workflow. Adding the agent to new servers is quick and painless

Incentivized

• We were able to quickly identify our most time consuming APIs. In some cases we were able to bring down times for some apis from 4s to 200ms.
• We were able to identify our slowest database queries and optimize them for quicker response times.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized