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,…
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Spotlight
Score 7.4 out of 10
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Spotlight from Quest Software is a database performance monitoring option.
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Pricing
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Spotlight
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SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Spotlight
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
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Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
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Community Pulse
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Spotlight
Considered Both Products
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
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Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
I have used Spotlight (for Oracle on RAC) but it has been several years. The dashboard was crisp, clean, and intuitive, but the tool had a significant overhead. However, no competitor made a tool that met our needs at the time. I have also used Idera's SQL Diagnostic Manager in …
Spotlight SQL Monitor. Spotlight is (in my opinion) better for monitoring general database and server issues. DPA is better (the best) at identifying performance issues.
DPA is a market leader and goes beyond what most products in the space can offer. It's a battle between SQL Sentry and DPA for the lead and everybody has their favorite. I personally prefer DPA for ease of install, management and better tuning and query advice options.
I like the web-based interface and wait stats analysis of DPA. Some of the other tools have more features, but DPA feels like a more polished tool, and the features it has work well. It's been a while since I've looked at the competitors' products. DPA works well for us, and …
I have done my comparison against SQL Sentry and I feel like Solarwinds Database Performance Analyzer for SQL Server is more of a graphical tool, so it lets you see wait time for a database instance. That's really nice when you're dealing with similar instances. We haven't …
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.
Spotlight is great when you need a tool to give a quick look at a SQL server as a whole. It gives you the ability to see a lot of things, which can be vital in diagnosing problems or identifying stressors. Less great is the open-end of some of the diagnoses it makes, and things it identifies as "problems" (unless you love users coming to you and saying something like "Spotlight says there's a problem with our page latch!!!").
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think Dell is better with its dashboard and ease of use, but SQL Sentry is better at customization. We used Spotlight at my previous company, and SQLSentry at my current company.