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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    SolarWinds SQL Sentry

    Score10 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds 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

    VAI ERP

    Score8.4 out of 10
    Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
    VAI ERP (or S2K Enterprise) is a cloud-based ERP solution for durable goods distributors and manufacturers, offering multiple order processing options, inventory and purchase management, warehouse management, and customer relationship management features.

    $5,100

    per month

    Pricing
    SolarWinds SQL SentryVAI ERP
    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)
    VAI ERP
    $255.00
    per month per user
    VAI ERP
    $2,200
    one-time fee per user
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    SolarWinds SQL SentryVAI ERP
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup fee-$50,000,250,000 one-time fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    SolarWinds SQL SentryVAI ERP
    Considered Both Products
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    11 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    5 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    11 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    11 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    8 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    91%
    Implementation went as expected
    10 Answers
    Features
    SolarWinds SQL SentryVAI ERP
    SQL Performance Monitoring
    Comparison of SQL Performance Monitoring features of SolarWinds SQL Sentry and VAI ERP
    Feature
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    8.4
    102 Ratings
    3% above category average
    VAI ERP
    -
    Ratings
    Performance dashboard9.1102 Ratings00 Ratings
    Intelligent alerting7.996 Ratings00 Ratings
    Top SQL8.6102 Ratings00 Ratings
    Historical trend data8.6100 Ratings00 Ratings
    Virtualization support8.764 Ratings00 Ratings
    Customization
    Comparison of Customization features of SolarWinds SQL Sentry and VAI ERP
    Feature
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    VAI ERP
    6.5
    9 Ratings
    14% below category average
    API for custom integration00 Ratings6.412 Ratings
    Plug-ins00 Ratings6.59 Ratings
    Security
    Comparison of Security features of SolarWinds SQL Sentry and VAI ERP
    Feature
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    VAI ERP
    7.1
    10 Ratings
    17% below category average
    Single sign-on capability00 Ratings6.59 Ratings
    Role-based user permissions00 Ratings7.813 Ratings
    Reporting & Analytics
    Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of SolarWinds SQL Sentry and VAI ERP
    Feature
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    VAI ERP
    6.9
    11 Ratings
    8% below category average
    Dashboards00 Ratings7.111 Ratings
    Standard reports00 Ratings6.514 Ratings
    Custom reports00 Ratings7.213 Ratings
    General Ledger and Configurable Accounting
    Comparison of General Ledger and Configurable Accounting features of SolarWinds SQL Sentry and VAI ERP
    Feature
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    VAI ERP
    7.4
    11 Ratings
    4% below category average
    Accounts payable00 Ratings7.714 Ratings
    Accounts receivable00 Ratings7.714 Ratings
    Global Financial Support00 Ratings7.17 Ratings
    Primary and Secondary Ledgers00 Ratings7.48 Ratings
    Journals and Reconciliations00 Ratings7.512 Ratings
    Configurable Accounting00 Ratings7.110 Ratings
    Standardized Processes00 Ratings7.611 Ratings
    Inventory Management
    Comparison of Inventory Management features of SolarWinds SQL Sentry and VAI ERP
    Feature
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    VAI ERP
    7.8
    11 Ratings
    2% below category average
    Inventory tracking00 Ratings7.914 Ratings
    Automatic reordering00 Ratings7.711 Ratings
    Location management00 Ratings7.713 Ratings
    Order Management
    Comparison of Order Management features of SolarWinds SQL Sentry and VAI ERP
    Feature
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    VAI ERP
    7.7
    11 Ratings
    3% below category average
    Pricing00 Ratings8.114 Ratings
    Order entry00 Ratings8.114 Ratings
    Credit card processing00 Ratings7.06 Ratings
    Cost of goods sold00 Ratings8.113 Ratings
    Order Orchestration00 Ratings7.210 Ratings
    Subledger and Financial Process
    Comparison of Subledger and Financial Process features of SolarWinds SQL Sentry and VAI ERP
    Feature
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    VAI ERP
    6.8
    11 Ratings
    10% below category average
    Billing Management00 Ratings7.37 Ratings
    Cash and Asset Management00 Ratings7.29 Ratings
    Budgetary Control & Encumbrance Accounting00 Ratings5.54 Ratings
    Period Close00 Ratings7.313 Ratings
    Procurement
    Comparison of Procurement features of SolarWinds SQL Sentry and VAI ERP
    Feature
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    VAI ERP
    7.1
    9 Ratings
    0% above category average
    Requisitions-to-Purchase Orders Integrated00 Ratings7.510 Ratings
    Supplier Management00 Ratings6.710 Ratings
    Logistics
    Comparison of Logistics features of SolarWinds SQL Sentry and VAI ERP
    Feature
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    VAI ERP
    6.1
    6 Ratings
    14% below category average
    Transportation Execution Management00 Ratings5.23 Ratings
    Trade and Customs Management00 Ratings5.54 Ratings
    Fulfillment Management00 Ratings7.06 Ratings
    Warehouse Workforce Management00 Ratings6.89 Ratings
    Manufacturing
    Comparison of Manufacturing features of SolarWinds SQL Sentry and VAI ERP
    Feature
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    VAI ERP
    6.9
    5 Ratings
    8% below category average
    Production Management00 Ratings6.56 Ratings
    Configuration Management00 Ratings7.47 Ratings
    Work Execution00 Ratings6.55 Ratings
    Manufacturing Costs00 Ratings7.38 Ratings
    Supply Chain
    Comparison of Supply Chain features of SolarWinds SQL Sentry and VAI ERP
    Feature
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    -
    Ratings
    VAI ERP
    7.5
    7 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Forecasting00 Ratings7.37 Ratings
    Inventory Planning00 Ratings7.610 Ratings
    Performance Monitoring00 Ratings7.68 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    SolarWinds SQL SentryVAI ERP
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Zoho One
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    Zoho One
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft Dynamics AX (discontinued)
    Score4.8 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    SolarWinds SQL SentryVAI ERP
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.6
    (102 ratings)
    8.4
    (15 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.8
    (16 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (12 ratings)
    7.7
    (15 ratings)
    Availability
    7.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    7.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.5
    (14 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.8
    (8 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 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 SentryVAI ERP
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    VAI base package software has a lot of productive tools that can be used for a lot of different types of businesses. At first I was taken back by this saying it would just be more efficient if they would just build it more specific to a certain business type, but now stepping back i see why they don't. They are able to customize it more to my needs
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    • Design and ease of entering data into screens.
    • Drill downs provided as you move around screens.
    • Help Text for each screen.
    • Back end programming easy to follow - good documentation.
    • Interfaces to third party software - ex. Mark Magic Forms.
    • Great Help Desk.
    • Training Videos.
    • Workflows and Triggers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Read full review
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    • There will most likely be customizations made for a particular niche site to integrate with their system.
    • Product reviews, up sells, and cross sells are not built into the website functionality. Customization to the offerings would be needed.
    • Very little documentation or open source resources on instructions or development in regards to the website design and integration with the ERP.
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    S2K is easy to use, has room for growth, and serves the company's needs as a whole
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    Often times it seems people want to learn a platform in seconds and if they can't they say it is not "user friendly." There are some platforms that can do so much that it is just going to take time to learn it all. To me that is a good thing. S2K takes time to learn but it is worth it. It can transform your organization.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    Great support. The staff is very knowledgeable about the platform and the capabilities within the IBM framework
    Read full review
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    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).
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    If this is someone's first ERP implementation, I strongly suggest you ask for services to help implement. Ask for training on every aspect of the implementation. Make sure this is put into the overall ERP quote
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    S2K offered a system that could be used by various departments. There were modules for accounting, customer service, order entry, and web development. The ability to customize the website integration was a plus. S2K allows the option to have products in different warehouse locations. This allowed us to better manage inventory and see in real time what the stock status was
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)
    • Sales - since all screens are real-time, S2K helps keep our salespeople up to date with customer sales and their overall sales for each period/year.
    • CSR - tracking of customer orders from point of entry to invoicing, being able to give the customer current information on their order by viewing a single screen.
    • Purchasing - with multiple locations, tracking, and having inventory in the correct location to meet the customer demands that are shipped from their home location.
    • Warehouse bin/item management makes picking orders a fast, accurate process, with the addition of order verification.
    • Accounting - being able to see real-time information across all applications. A/R, A/P, and G/L.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots

    Screenshot of SQL Sentry DeadlocksScreenshot of SQL Sentry Top SQL

    VAI ERP Screenshots

    Screenshot of VAI ERP Product SuiteScreenshot of VAI Item InquiryScreenshot of VAI Mobile Warehouse