IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs. SolarWinds SQL Sentry

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
SQL Diagnostic Manager for Microsoft SQL Server helps database administrators to find and fix Microsoft SQL Server performance problems in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Unlike its competition, it provides effective scalability, advanced SQL query analysis and optimization, prescriptive analysis with corrective SQL scripts, powerful automated alert responses, broad PowerShell integration, complete customization, and extensive support for current and legacy Microsoft SQL Server and…
$1,996
per instance with first year maintenance included
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
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
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL ServerSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Editions & Modules
Standard via eCommerce
1,996.00
per instance with first year maintenance included
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
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL ServerSolarWinds 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
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL ServerSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Considered Both Products
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Chose IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
All the toolsets we looked at have the same basic feature sets. We felt like IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server had more features (SQL Doctor features) and better historical features. More toolsets now have a lot of these features, but for eight years, IDERA SQL …
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
It provided a much better feature set
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
SQL Sentry has a LOT more information in it than the SolarWinds DPA product. Its reporting tool isn't as good either.

The IDERA product isn't as reliable as SQL Sentry and its reporting isn't nearly as good. The IDERA UI is a resource hog and isn't as intuitive.
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
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 …
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
SQL Sentry was just a more slick application to use versus Idera. Visually it was easier to navigate and manage, and the ability to move licenses about to Instances was a benefit.
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
It has been a while now since using the Idera product, but SQL Sentry seems to provide greater configuration and alerting options. SQL Sentry offers 12 different options, all of which are configurable individually for each alert. It can be done at the global level as well as by …
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
I have used tools from Idera, redgate, and also Solarwinds. SQL Sentry is one of the better tools out on the market in my opinion.
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
I like SQL Sentry the best. Foglight was a long time ago and way more comprehensive tool than I needed at the time. Diagnostic Manager has some good features but I had some capacity and performance issues at times with it. SQL Sentry has been consistent and effective at …
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Other tools in the SQL Sentry Suite helped determine the purchasing decision. In particular the SQL Sentry Event manager product allowed us to easily connect and visualize the overnight process. Previously the overnight process was schedule driven and prone to fail as a result …
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Both tools cover what you'd expect from an enterprise-grade SQL monitoring tool. Performance monitoring, alerting and diagnostics on both the tools are excellent and I cannot fault either on technical capabilities and feature offerings.

For SQL Managed Services providers, SQL …
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry

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 …

Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
I have tried SQL optimizer and Idera's diagnostic manager. Of the three, SQL Sentry is my favorite. I like the dashboard, the tab layout, the interface.
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Sentry is more centralized and wide open. It has abilities to "dive" into deepest SQL aspects providing details that other products are just unable to do. It is not just a quick monitoring, alerting tool. It has the unique ability to "teach" or "remind" you (throughout policies …
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
The former company I worked for had such an extremely large and high volume transaction volume. Idera's SQL Diagnostic Manager just could not keep up with the pace of the transactions. The main SQL server cluster was running between 25,000 to 50,000 transactions per second (24 …
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
We selected Performance Advisor primarily due to the intuitive primary display, drill-down ability, ease of use and low overhead.
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
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 …
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
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 …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL ServerSolarWinds SQL Sentry
SQL Performance Monitoring
Comparison of SQL Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
8.0
4 Ratings
4% below category average
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
8.4
102 Ratings
1% above category average
Performance dashboard9.04 Ratings9.2102 Ratings
Intelligent alerting8.04 Ratings7.996 Ratings
Top SQL9.04 Ratings8.6102 Ratings
Historical trend data9.04 Ratings8.6100 Ratings
Virtualization support5.14 Ratings8.764 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL ServerSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Redgate SQL Monitor
Redgate SQL Monitor
Score 8.2 out of 10
Redgate SQL Monitor
Redgate SQL Monitor
Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Redgate SQL Monitor
Redgate SQL Monitor
Score 8.2 out of 10
Redgate SQL Monitor
Redgate SQL Monitor
Score 8.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL ServerSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(4 ratings)
8.6
(102 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(16 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(12 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
7.1
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.1
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.5
(14 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(8 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
7.9
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.5
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL ServerSolarWinds SQL Sentry
Likelihood to Recommend
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
If you have several SQL servers and don't have a lot of time or resources to constantly monitor them, SQLdm will be very helpful. For one or two servers, it might be overkill. All of our servers are virtual, so having a tool that can monitor host metrics as well as guest metrics is a plus as well.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Pros
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
  • Database query optimization.
  • Monitoring of databases in real time.
  • Performance analysis and trends in the database.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Cons
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
  • Windows client has some issues. When you have small time intervals for your data collection, it can cause the client to become unresponsive and require you to restart it.
  • It takes more time to get the web client running than it does to get the windows client running.
  • The visualizations have been the same for the last eight years--could use a little bit of a refresh.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
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
Read full review
Usability
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Performance
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
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
Read full review
Support Rating
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
In-Person Training
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
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
Read full review
Implementation Rating
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
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).
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server is an excellent tool, however I think Solarwinds Database Perfromance Analyzer is a slightly stronger more well rounded product
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Scalability
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
IDERA (an Idera, Inc. company)
  • It saves me a significant amount of time each week, freeing me up for other important tasks. I couldn't possibly monitor each server individually to the extent that SQLdm does.
  • With the wealth of information I can get to easily, I can be more proactive in taking care of my environments rather than reactive. The times when other people notice something happening before I do are few and far between.
Read full review
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
Read full review
ScreenShots

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server Screenshots

Screenshot of SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots

Screenshot of SQL Sentry DeadlocksScreenshot of SQL Sentry Top SQL