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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SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Score 9.0 out of 10
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SolarWinds SQL Sentry is designed to help data professionals optimize SQL Server database performance
in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. SQL Sentry delivers metrics to help users find and fix database performance problems
and provides scalability, boasting demonstrated success monitoring 800+ SQL
Server instances with one monitoring database. With
SQL Sentry, the user can monitor:
SQL Server
Azure SQL
Database
SQL Server
Analysis…
$0
Free
Pricing
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Plan Explorer (SQL Server Query Tuning)
$0
Free
SQL Sentry for Azure SQL Database
$161
Per year per database (annual subscription)
SQL Sentry
1,450
Per year per instance (annual subscription)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Considered Both Products
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Verified User
Employee
Chose SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
SolarWinds was chosen by our system administrator before I joined the company. It was what he found when he searched for SQL Monitoring tools. After a demo of SQL Sentry/Sentry One, he wants to pursue that tool instead of SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA). We find …
Overall DPA is the best tool that I have used because of its simple interface and ability to dig in within a few clicks to see the root of a performance issue, but Idera and SQL Sentry have some areas where they are better than DPA, such as blocking and deadlocks. I also feel …
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.
Quest Spotlight had a 70-page installation manual - quite daunting. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer, on the other hand, is pretty straightforward to install and use. I'm looking forward to exploring SQL Sentry but haven't gotten far into it yet.
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 …
DPA simply provides another angle over the performance of the server, plus it is very quiet and has little overhead. I also like how historical performance data is stored, and although it does not really let you decide how it is aggregated, it is good enough.
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 …
I haven't seen a better tool for analyzing and tuning queries based upon wait times. However, for operational monitoring, finding current blocking, and at times slow queries that aren't run frequently, it lacks true benefit. Best use is for long term production query tuning and …
We chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry because it met more of our requirements than any other single tool. Proactive monitoring, quick collection times (every few seconds vs minutes), flexible custom alerting as well as in-depth data for performance analysis (Top SQL is by far my …
Every resource has a different way of allowing users to access performance data and events, I simply think that SQL Sentry does it the best by displaying a dashboard that allows seeing the data in angles that no other has.
The sheer amount of information, ability to tune almost all areas of alerting and thresholds, and the low impact of monitoring as well as transparency into how their monitoring processes may impact performance gives them the advantage over these others. In some cases their …
SQL Sentry has a dashboard and tools that better suit our needs as a business. The tab based layout we found was easier to use and for the layman to understand. The top SQL feature has been invaluable to us for locating problems in real time.
PA has the lightest monitoring footprint of any of the other third-party applications out there. The featureset of PA includes things such as virtualization monitoring, top SQL statements, and granular historical trending that other products miss or gloss over. The sheer amount …
Verified User
Employee
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
It was the easiest to use and setup. It was effortless to install and setup. We immediately saw the results without the need to go through a bunch of setup screens.
For us, there were 3 big items that swung SQL Sentry. 1) customization of alerts and notification 2) polers in other domains allow for a more secure deployment. In addition, the polers allow for redundancy, ensuring we are spending time fighting fires, not fixing the fire …
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.
This solution is perfect for a team with a large server count and, at least, moderate experience supporting a SQL Server environment. If the environment is smaller or the team has less experience working with SQL Server performance tuning methodologies, then the tool may be overwhelming for the users.
The Top SQL functionality has been extremely useful for identifying poorly performing queries by resource consumption.
The flexibility of creating your own Advisory Conditions has allowed us to integrate our custom internal alerts into a centralized dashboard and alerting platform.
Being able to highlight any chart on the dashboard and then tool-matching that window across all the other charts makes it much easier to correlate the different performance metrics against each other.
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.
Tuning advice: With all the graphs and data available, it's not always easy to determine the best thing to do. I'd like to see SentryOne provide some best practice analysis based on the historical information collected for the server being looked at.
They could add help tips or links to help documents, when you select a graph on the dashboard. Inexperienced users tend to put blinders on and focus on one thing when they see a high counter or something out of the ordinary. It would be very useful to include a link that provides underlying help. The link would provide an explanation of the counter in detail and offer possible explanations as to why the counter is off.
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
Absolutely. SQL Sentry is an absolute must have for any company with a SQL Server estate. It provides a force multiplier to effectively manage SQL Server, and the feature sets are second to none. The support and expertise at SentryOne is incredible. They are very supportive of both the platform users and helping your business with the product
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 accept that the flexibility of the alerting comes at a price. Other than the alerting SQL Sentry's interface is intuitive. Connecting to a new SQL instance, given that all the needed ports are open in your firewalls is straight forward. Reviewing the performance and queries for an instance is available in with a right click. As you dig in new tabs are created to present the detailed data. I find the ability to filter and rollup metrics on a query very helpful in dealing with the "it's running slow". You can easily compare the metrics of run times for the same query to let the user know, it's probably data your doing a billion reads instead of the usual 100 thousand.
The system is working perfectly in capturing data, but we do experience issues with SQL Timeout when viewing results in the remote clients. This may be due to the fact that our monitoring service is consuming most of the CPU, and it is the same server that is hosting the SQL Repository. We could probably fix the issue by separating the SQL instance from the monitoring service.
In most cases the pages load very quickly. In our particular case, we need to do some movement of services to separate our monitoring service to separate infrastructure from the repository. When we first started with SQL Sentry on 5 licenses, we did not have any issues. Since we have now grown that to 25, we are experiencing some challenges. We do not believe this to be a tool problem
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.
From their infancy as a smaller company to now as a global player they have always kept focus on prioritising he customer. They know their product and the technology it supports and are easily accessible for both resolving problems with the product all the way to adding value through additional training and assisting with getting return on investment through utilisation of the many features the product provides.
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.
Was suggested that we install the process monitors on a dev or qa database server, but we found it more useful to create an IT db server and put it there (along with a few other apps that we use for monitoring).
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.
SQL Sentry offers more features and is customize-able to fit our business needs. It has more centralized management and support. The company's technical support is also top notch. It is also worth mentioning that SentryOne Team Blog is an excellent source. One can find lots of valuable troubleshooting skills on the blog site - very educational and informational.
We are running 25 instances through a single monitoring service and it is able to keep up. We are finding that this many instances in our environment is about as many as can be handled. We will need to deploy additional monitoring services. Luckily, there is no additional licensing costs to deploy additional monitoring services. For us, it's just an additional Azure VM.
Better customer service as it alerts me automatically to loss of service issues so I can react and either get things fixed before it impacts the customers or to let my management know as soon as possible
It helps me find expensive SQL so our customers get better performance and we make better use of our resources