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SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) vs. SolarWinds SQL Sentry

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

    Score10 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is a tool for monitoring, performance management, capacity planning and optimization for on-premises or cloud-based virtual environments. It also integrates with other SolarWinds products.N/A

    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 Virtualization Manager (VMAN)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 Virtualization Manager (VMAN)SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Considered Both Products
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    The service and support with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor has been excellent and much better than any of the competitors' products I have tried. The ability to make a query anonymous and submit to the SQL Sentry community is also a great feature I had never seen before in a …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    14 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    5 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    93%
    Happy with the feature set
    13 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    12 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    13 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    Features
    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    SQL Performance Monitoring
    Comparison of SQL Performance Monitoring features of SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) and SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Feature
    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    -
    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
    Best Alternatives
    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter
    Score7.6 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Enterprises
    OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter
    Score7.6 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (66 ratings)
    8.6
    (102 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.6
    (7 ratings)
    8.8
    (16 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    9.0
    (12 ratings)
    Availability
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    7.1
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    7.1
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.8
    (6 ratings)
    7.5
    (14 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.1
    (3 ratings)
    8.8
    (8 ratings)
    Configurability
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.9
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.5
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.5
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    Likelihood to Recommend
    SolarWinds
    On the whole, Solarwinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is an excellent product which gives us a single point to monitor our virtual environment. After our initial trial I was sold on the product and what it had to offer. Immediately after implementing VMAN, we were able to spot virtual machines with old snapshots which were never deleted and no longer needed, we could spot virtual machines which either had over allocated resources or under allocated resources meaning we could make changes and fine tune them for best performance. We could also monitor virtual machine latency, IOPS, and show us where our bottlenecks were.
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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
    • I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
    • I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
    • Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
    • Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.
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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.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    SolarWinds
    • We did have issues during the setup, with successfully connecting to some of our hosts and vCenters and we found support were just sending us back to articles we had already read, it was also taking long periods before getting a response. The issue is still ongoing, in fact.
    Incentivized
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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
    Currently, there is no other tool that gives us what we need to monitor a geographically disperse environment with multiple non-related instances of VM clusters. In addition, the level of reporting, historical data trending, and alerting that VMAN provides is essential for our business process. Lastly, the effort to customize and set up any monitoring system is not trivial. This makes switching to any other product very difficult without being able to clearly demonstrate a ROI.
    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
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    SolarWinds
    SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.
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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
    We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.
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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
    We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.
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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
    SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.
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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
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    Implementation Rating
    SolarWinds
    Its really the best product on the market for someone looking to have total control over their VM environment. anyone interested should download a demo and try it, I know you will buy it after you do. It changing the way you have to manage on a daily basis
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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
    The operation began using Nagios XI, after a year of use, and based on the results obtained, we realized that what our client wanted was not fully met. Our client asked us to use WhatsUp, however, SolarWinds covered in a more efficient way what was required by our client (IT) and even more.
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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
    Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.
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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
    • VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware.
    • VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined.
    • VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views.
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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
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    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot

    SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots

    Screenshot of SQL Sentry DeadlocksScreenshot of SQL Sentry Top SQL