Sentry vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Great for standard web application performance monitoring, analytics and error reporting. Shows line level code errors, gives insight into performance issues (plugins, API issues, etc.). Automation and scheduled scanning in production gives client visibility into 'after deployment' value. Also lets a relatively small number of developers keep tabs on a handful of different site/applications without needing a bunch of tools. The UI is pretty complicated and can be overwhelming for new users. Documentation could be better for the learning curve,

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

• Great web interface. Lots of data available in a really clean format, with filtering options and more.
• Per-user exception tracking. User is complaining about something being broken? Look up their account ID in Sentry and you can see if they've run into any exceptions (with device information included, of course).
• Source map uploading. Took a little while to figure this out but now we have our deploy script upload sourcemaps to Sentry on each deployment, meaning we get to see stack traces that aren't obfuscated!
• Very generous free tier – 10,000 events per month. We're nowhere near that yet.

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

• Alert Configuration. Would be really helpful to have multiple logical groupings within the "If" section of a single configurable alert.
• Alert Copying. Being able to copy an alert from one project to another would be super beneficial.
• Alert Tags. Better UI around how we select which tags are getting sent with each alert instead of a tiny text box.

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

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

Its incredibly versatile, but that leads to complexity for the uninitiated, which can be intimidating. Nevertheless its a well polished product, in our case leading to only using it for a focus on frontend is still more cost effective than buying a one-to-rule-them-all tool...

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

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

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

It is cheaper and offers better support for front-end applications for enterprise large environments with more then 30 scrum teams and hundreds of micro frontend applications. The configuration options, both with the agent and from the user interface, are superior to other tools, and the documentation is also very easy to use.

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

• So it has helped us for quick error resolutions.
• From dashboard we are able to assign errors to particular member and see when its resolved.
• Without customer informing us about errors we know what happened in real time helps in customer service also.

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