Spotlight vs. SolarWinds SQL Sentry vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor

Spotlight’s ability to consolidate data from various entities and provide insightful reports is highly beneficial. It streamlines financial reporting, allowing professionals to focus on advisory services and strategic decision-making.Small businesses, nonprofits, and organizations that need regular board packs or executive summaries find Spotlight useful. Less Appropriate: Certain industries (e.g., specialized manufacturing, healthcare, or research) have unique reporting needs. Spotlight’s generic templates may not cover all industry-specific metrics or compliance requirements.

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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.

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Computing resources consumed by the DB instance, DPA queries & wait time, deadlock conditions, virtual infrastructure resources. The addition of NPM & DPA integration as well as cross-correlation in the identification of issues with the network or server or DB is all stupid-proof. Monitoring is more than just health and resource consumption, it's also performance. DB performance analysis is key to maintaining healthy DB instances.

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• Great SQL server monitoring
• Rewind and playback of previous times

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• 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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• Simple to use and very easy to learn.
• The execution engines run in parallel, can execute any syntax or query.
• DPN can run all queries for both Oracle and SQL with no additional support.

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• My only complaint was the cost.

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• 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.

• The Reporting feature currently doesn't allow customization.

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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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the platform offers a clean, easy to use interface. You can customize reports and dashboard. Integration is also pretty good, you can integrate to Xero, QBO and MYOB and excel spreadsheets. It also offers very broad supporting documents and webinars. There are only two downside of Spotlight; learning curve (it could be a bit difficult at the beginning to learn the system) and price point (For small businesses, Spotlight Reporting can be seen as relatively expensive compared to other reporting tools)

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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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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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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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I've never had to contact support, as of yet I have had no issues or problems with the tool. This is after 5 years of use.

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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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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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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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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.

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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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DPM is less expensive and more feature-rich. Also, Oracle tech support is garbage, unless you can afford to spend a day getting assistance.

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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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• Spotlight is reasonably inexpensive, and any one of the multiple things we use it for more than justifies the cost.

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• 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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• What is the cost of a downed DB instance? That's your ROI. DPM lets you see issues before they become critical.

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