SolarWinds SQL Sentry vs. Tableau Desktop

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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The best scenario is definitely to collect data from several sources and create dedicated dashboards for specific recipients. However, I miss the possibility of explaining these reports in more detail. Sometimes, we order a report, and after half a year, we don't remember the meaning of some data (I know it's our fault as an organization, but the tool could force better practices).

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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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• An excellent tool for data visualization, it presents information in an appealing visual format—an exceptional platform for storing and analyzing data in any size organization.
• Through interactive parameters, it enables real-time interaction with the user and is easy to learn and get support from the community.

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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.

• Pricing should be more user-friendly and usage-driven
• Making edits to the production reports is fairly tough and has a vast scope of additional capabilities
• Tableau Desktop should be able to differentiate itself from the Tableau server else there is no major meaning of two different products being offered

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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Our use of Tableau Desktop is still fairly low, and will continue over time. The only real concern is around cost of the licenses, and I have mentioned this to Tableau and fully expect the development of more sensible models for our industry. This will remove any impediment to expansion of our use.

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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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Tableau Desktop has proven to be a lifesaver in many situations. Once we've completed the initial setup, it's simple to use. It has all of the features we need to quickly and efficiently synthesize our data. Tableau Desktop has advanced capabilities to improve our company's data structure and enable self-service for our employees.

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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When used as a stand-alone tool, Tableau Desktop has unlimited uptime, which is always nice. When used in conjunction with Tableau Server, this tool has as much uptime as your server admins are willing to give it. All in all, I've never had an issue with Tableau's availability.

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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Tableau Desktop's performance is solid. You can really dig into a large dataset in the form of a spreadsheet, and it exhibits similarly good performance when accessing a moderately sized Oracle database. I noticed that with Tableau Desktop 9.3, the performance using a spreadsheet started to slow around 75K rows by about 60 columns. This was easily remedied by creating an extract and pushing it to Tableau Server, where performance went to lightning fast

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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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Tableau support has been extremely responsive and willing to help with all of our requests. They have assisted with creating advanced analysis and many different types of custom icons, data formatting, formulas, and actions embedded into graphs. Tableau offers a weekly presentation of features and assists with internal company projects.

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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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It is admittedly hard to train a group of people with disparate levels of ability coming in, but the software is so easy to use that this is not a huge problem; anyone who can follow simple instructions can catch up pretty quickly.

I think the training was good overall, but it was maybe stating the obvious things that a tech savvy young engineer would be able to pick up themselves too. However, the example work books were good and Tableau web community has helped me with many problems

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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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Again, training is the key and the company provides a lot of example videos that will help users discover use cases that will greatly assist their creation of original visualizations. As with any new software tool, productivity will decline for a period. In the case of Tableau, the decline period is short and the later gains are well worth it.

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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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I have used Power BI as well, the pricing is better, and also training costs or certifications are not that high. Since there is python integration in Power BI where I can use data cleaning and visualizing libraries and also some machine learning models. I can import my python scripts and create a visualization on processed data.

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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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Tableau Desktop's scaleability is really limited to the scale of your back-end data systems. If you want to pull down an extract and work quickly in-memory, in my application it scaled to a few tens of millions of rows using the in-memory engine. But it's really only limited by your back-end data store if you have or are willing to invest in an optimized SQL store or purpose-built query engine like Veritca or Netezza or something similar.

• 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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• Tableau was acquired years ago, and has provided good value with the content created.
• Ongoing maintenance costs for the platform, both to maintain desktop and server licensing has made the continuing value questionable when compared to other offerings in the marketplace.
• Users have largely been satisfied with the content, but not with the overall performance. This is due to a combination of factors including the performance of the Tableau engines as well as development deficiencies.

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