SolarWinds SQL Sentry vs. Terracotta

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Terracotta
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Terracotta from German company Software AG presents a database management and development solution.N/A
Pricing
SolarWinds SQL SentryTerracotta
Editions & Modules
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)
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SolarWinds SQL SentryTerracotta
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
SolarWinds SQL SentryTerracotta
SQL Performance Monitoring
Comparison of SQL Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
8.4
102 Ratings
1% above category average
Terracotta
-
Ratings
Performance dashboard9.2102 Ratings00 Ratings
Intelligent alerting7.996 Ratings00 Ratings
Top SQL8.6102 Ratings00 Ratings
Historical trend data8.6100 Ratings00 Ratings
Virtualization support8.764 Ratings00 Ratings
Database Development
Comparison of Database Development features of Product A and Product B
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
-
Ratings
Terracotta
10.0
3 Ratings
16% above category average
Version control tools00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
Test data generation00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
Performance optimization tools00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
Schema maintenance00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
Database change management00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
Database Administration
Comparison of Database Administration features of Product A and Product B
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
-
Ratings
Terracotta
10.0
3 Ratings
15% above category average
User management00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
Database security00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
Database status reporting00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
Change management00 Ratings10.03 Ratings
Best Alternatives
SolarWinds SQL SentryTerracotta
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

DBeaver
DBeaver
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Redgate SQL Monitor
Redgate SQL Monitor
Score 8.2 out of 10
DBeaver
DBeaver
Score 8.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Redgate SQL Monitor
Redgate SQL Monitor
Score 8.2 out of 10
DBeaver
DBeaver
Score 8.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
SolarWinds SQL SentryTerracotta
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(102 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.8
(16 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(12 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
7.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.5
(14 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.8
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
7.9
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
SolarWinds SQL SentryTerracotta
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
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Software AG
Magnificent for data virtualization. Terrific to reduce infrastructure cost on IT operations. Excellent with workflow management. Great with data configuration and on-premise installation. Fabulous with data warehousing.
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Pros
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.
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Software AG
No answers on this topic
Cons
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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Software AG
No answers on this topic
Likelihood to Renew
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
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Software AG
No answers on this topic
Usability
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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Software AG
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
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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Software AG
No answers on this topic
Performance
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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Software AG
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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Software AG
No answers on this topic
In-Person Training
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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Software AG
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
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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Software AG
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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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Software AG
Super friendly and responsive customer service. Reliable and consistent with data management. Great with data visualization. Efficient with data replication.
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Scalability
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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Software AG
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
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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Software AG
No answers on this topic
ScreenShots

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots

Screenshot of SQL Sentry DeadlocksScreenshot of SQL Sentry Top SQL