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SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) vs. SolarWinds SQL Sentry

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    SolarWinds NPM

    Score7.8 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds NPM is a monitoring and performance management platform. It provides performance troubleshooting support, auto network discovery, customizable thresholds, and can be rapidly deployed.

    $1,638

    per year

    SolarWinds SQL Sentry

    Score10 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds 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 NPMSolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Editions & Modules
    NPM
    $1,638
    per year
    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 NPMSolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    SolarWinds NPMSolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Considered Both Products
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    We evaluated couple of product on certain parameters like global view, performance tuning recommendations, analysis, expensive/long running queries, IO information, alerts, dashboard, reports, licensing model and pricing etc. We decided to select SQL Sentry Performance Advisor …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    91%
    Would buy again
    32 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    33 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    5 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    34 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    29 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    97%
    Implementation went as expected
    30 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    Features
    SolarWinds NPMSolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Network Performance Monitoring
    Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) and SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Feature
    SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
    9.0
    232 Ratings
    13% above category average
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    Automated network device discovery9.0211 Ratings00 Ratings
    Network monitoring10.0232 Ratings00 Ratings
    Baseline threshold calculation9.0202 Ratings00 Ratings
    Alerts9.0229 Ratings00 Ratings
    Network capacity planning7.9188 Ratings00 Ratings
    Packet capture analysis7.2130 Ratings00 Ratings
    Network mapping10.0191 Ratings00 Ratings
    Customizable reports10.0213 Ratings00 Ratings
    Wireless infrastructure monitoring8.0154 Ratings00 Ratings
    Hardware health monitoring10.0216 Ratings00 Ratings
    SQL Performance Monitoring
    Comparison of SQL Performance Monitoring features of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) and SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Feature
    SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
    -
    Ratings
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    8.4
    102 Ratings
    3% above category average
    Performance dashboard00 Ratings9.1102 Ratings
    Intelligent alerting00 Ratings7.996 Ratings
    Top SQL00 Ratings8.6102 Ratings
    Historical trend data00 Ratings8.6100 Ratings
    Virtualization support00 Ratings8.764 Ratings
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    SolarWinds NPMSolarWinds SQL Sentry
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    Auvik
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    Enterprises
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    Score8.7 out of 10
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    User Ratings
    SolarWinds NPMSolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.7
    (238 ratings)
    8.6
    (102 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.4
    (27 ratings)
    8.8
    (16 ratings)
    Usability
    10.0
    (22 ratings)
    9.0
    (12 ratings)
    Availability
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.1
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.1
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.0
    (28 ratings)
    7.5
    (14 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    10.0
    (7 ratings)
    8.8
    (8 ratings)
    Configurability
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.9
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.5
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.5
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    SolarWinds NPMSolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Likelihood to Recommend
    SolarWinds
    SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is excellent on node monitoring, for servers, switches, voice routers, etc. It also provides quick information on the dashboard, so you can take a look an in a few seconds determine is an entire site is down, if portions are down, and what may be causing the issue. We have experienced some difficulty when working with our wireless environment. It is less than natural when attempting to determine if a wireless access point is down itself, or if the switch feeding the access point is down, either port or switch. It does a very good job telling you if a switch is down, but troubleshooting the devices (specifically access points) it struggles.
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    SolarWinds
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    SolarWinds
    • Out of the Monitoring of almost all Network Devices.
    • Build custom pollers to monitor which is not supported out of the box.
    • Further you can alert on these custom metrics and Out of the box metrics.
    • It provides you great dashboards, Reports features.
    • You can integrate it with any MoM layer tools either using its API or sending out traps.
    • Out of the box Integration with Service Now ITSM Tool.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    • 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.
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    Cons
    SolarWinds
    • The software upgrade process is a little hairy and has caused me trouble on occasion.
    • The server that it needs to run is a bit of a resource hog along with the SQL server.
    • Some additional features like the network map are a bit clunky compared to some other products that we use.
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    SolarWinds
    • 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.
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    Likelihood to Renew
    SolarWinds
    The entire IT staff relies on NPM in its daily operations. It would be impossible for us to maintain our level of service without it. If SolarWinds gets to proud of their product and begins to over charge for it, we would be forced to reconsider and use a different product. But as it stands it is worth the price to renew it.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    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
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    Usability
    SolarWinds
    SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is quite an extensive product, covering all our bases and requirements. There are a lot of customizable options and features which you can work with for their alerting which is really useful. I haven't found anything yet which I thought SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) could do, but it actually couldn't so overall it works nicely and does the job.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    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.
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    Reliability and Availability
    SolarWinds
    Always available. Always is important to plan the software available during the machine/application setup.
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    SolarWinds
    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.
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    Performance
    SolarWinds
    Pages load slow, especially the bettors map. Could be that my server is old.
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    SolarWinds
    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
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    Support Rating
    SolarWinds
    In all of the times that we called support, someone at SolarWinds had the answer for us in a timely manner. Through thwack and other internet searching, we have been able to resolve all of our issues that arose to our satisfaction. The support staff have always been knowledgeable of their products or had a fellow support staff member to rely on to get the needed answers.
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    SolarWinds
    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.
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    In-Person Training
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    sql sentry expert came onsight to review the performance of installation and gave us a good insight to using the tool
    Incentivized
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    Online Training
    SolarWinds
    The training is good but during the implementation, you can get situations not learned during the training. The trainer was very open to hearing the questions about use cases and always sharing his experience. I really recommend having official training to take advantage of all features that the NPM can bring.
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    SolarWinds
    Make sure your inventory is accurate. Stand up some virtual machines for testing prior to installation. Make sure your database and its credentials are setup. Think about things you want to monitor that may not be obvious - UPS units, Door hardware, PBX systems, Fabric Channel switches, firewalls, routers, switches. Try to setup SNMP on these devices and have an IP that you will assign to the new server. If you do that it will go well.
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    SolarWinds
    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).
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    Alternatives Considered
    SolarWinds
    We use NPM along with PRTG Network Monitor. While NPM is great at monitoring network devices and network links and some aspects of the servers, PRTG provides more in-depth monitoring for Server systems, applications and application ports such as Web Ports etc. PRTG also provides a more comprehensive Root cause analysis.
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    SolarWinds
    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.
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    Scalability
    SolarWinds
    From the direction and information I have been given it is very flexible and scalelable
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    SolarWinds
    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.
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    Return on Investment
    SolarWinds
    • SolarWinds allows us to proactively address hardware issues before they impact the business. We recently had a server that was experiencing issues sporadically and we were able to use the data from SolarWinds to track down and correct the issue before it tanked the server.
    • SolarWinds gives our IT department some piece of mind knowing that they'll be alerted of any issues real time.
    • We can use SolarWinds data to justify needed to replace or upgrade certain equipment that is key to our core business.
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    SolarWinds
    • 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
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds NPM Screenshots

    Screenshot of Network monitoring software used to reduce network outages and detect, diagnose, and resolve multi-vendor network performance issues.Screenshot of See relationships for routers, switches, interfaces, volumes, and groups, updated automatically without user intervention to maintain the network, not network maps.Screenshot of Reduce visibility gaps into critical network switches, firewalls, and load balancers with Network Insight for Cisco Nexus, Cisco ASA, and F5 BIG-IP.Screenshot of Reduce the flood of unnecessary network alerts. Create alerts based on simple or complex nested trigger conditions, defined parent/child dependencies, and network topology.Screenshot of Identify dead zones and improve wireless coverage. With its network monitoring tool, users can access out-of-the-box wireless reports, including wireless availability and rogue access points.Screenshot of Configure alerts by calculating dynamic baseline threshold data with network performance monitoring software.

    SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots

    Screenshot of SQL Sentry DeadlocksScreenshot of SQL Sentry Top SQL