Spotlight vs. SQL Server Business Intelligence Manager

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.

Incentivized

SQL Server [Business Intelligence] Manager is useful for tracking performance across SSIS, SSRS and SSA and have the data represented in dashboards. It helps improve performance and helps end users. However, several features are redundant for smaller organization that can use the tools that comes with existing Microsoft products. These features also takes time to learn and use.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Types of alerts
• Dashboard view
• Configurable Alerts

Incentivized

• My only complaint was the cost.

Incentivized

• Lacks versioning control.
• Lacks support/native driver for alternative database.
• Only plays well with other Microsoft products.

Incentivized

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)

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

SQL Server Business Intelligence Manager does what SQL Server Management Studio should already do natively. So it actually fills up important gaps Microsoft left in its product.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• More efficiencies throughout the BI stack
• Less employees needed for monitoring all the BI processing
• Proactive error handling

Incentivized