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SolarWinds SQL Sentry vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor

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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

    SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor

    Score9 out of 10
    N/AVividCortex, acquired by SolarWinds in December 2019, provides database performance monitoring designed to increase system performance, team efficiency, and infrastructure cost savings. The GDPR- and SOC 2-compliant platform offers visibility into major open-source databases—MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora, MongoDB, and Redis—for the engineering team at scale. Industry leaders like Etsy, GitHub, SendGrid, and Yelp rely on Database Performance Monitor for all-query monitoring and drill…N/A
    Pricing
    SolarWinds SQL SentrySolarWinds Database Performance Monitor
    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 SentrySolarWinds Database Performance Monitor
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    SolarWinds SQL SentrySolarWinds Database Performance Monitor
    Considered Both Products
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    5 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    SolarWinds SQL SentrySolarWinds Database Performance Monitor
    SQL Performance Monitoring
    Comparison of SQL Performance Monitoring features of SolarWinds SQL Sentry and SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor
    Feature
    SolarWinds SQL Sentry
    8.4
    102 Ratings
    3% above category average
    SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor
    -
    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
    Best Alternatives
    SolarWinds SQL SentrySolarWinds Database Performance Monitor
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
    Score5.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    Foglight
    Score10 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    SolarWinds SQL SentrySolarWinds Database Performance Monitor
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.6
    (102 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.8
    (16 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (12 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 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 SentrySolarWinds Database Performance Monitor
    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
    SolarWinds
    Computing resources consumed by the DB instance, DPA queries & wait time, deadlock conditions, virtual infrastructure resources. The addition of NPM & DPA integration as well as cross-correlation in the identification of issues with the network or server or DB is all stupid-proof. Monitoring is more than just health and resource consumption, it's also performance. DB performance analysis is key to maintaining healthy DB instances.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • Simple to use and very easy to learn.
    • The execution engines run in parallel, can execute any syntax or query.
    • DPN can run all queries for both Oracle and SQL with no additional support.
    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
    SolarWinds
    • The Reporting feature currently doesn't allow customization.
    Incentivized
    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
    SolarWinds
    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.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    I would say it is a very good tool from overall perspective compared to what I have used till now, still I will give it like 9 just for the sake of the interface and the integration which they should be doing soon with the main module which is SAM , NPM etc.
    Incentivized
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    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
    SolarWinds
    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
    SolarWinds
    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
    SolarWinds
    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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    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
    SolarWinds
    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.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    SolarWinds DPA gives you a very deep analysis and monitoring of the devices which these tools will not give you neither Datadog or ManageEngine. It even gives you job rate , db locks and all other parameters to monitor which we usually do manually by going in to the DB and not from the tools. It also creates a dashboard out of the same.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    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
    SolarWinds
    • What is the cost of a downed DB instance? That's your ROI. DPM lets you see issues before they become critical.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots

    Screenshot of SQL Sentry DeadlocksScreenshot of SQL Sentry Top SQL

    SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor Screenshots

    Screenshot of The Profiler Dashboard is a powerful, dynamic dashboard for ranking and filtering activity on your servers: It can instantly show you what needs attention and it provides a unified view of all your database types that VividCortex monitors. It enables you to view and understand your system by profiling it according to its most significant attributes—customized and selected by you.Screenshot of This dashboard displays a list of queries and allows you to filter them with powerful specificity. Filters can be set according to query text, host, and timeframe when the query was first seen / last active.Screenshot of VividCortex captures an enormous amount of data, and the Summary Dashboard helps users make sense of it, reducing their time-to-insight. It features widgets with automatic displays for Top 5 Queries by Total Time, Top 5 Queries by User CPU, Application Overview, Critical Events, and more.Screenshot of VividCortex monitors thousands of metrics in your system, and the Charts and Dashboard’s navigation pane allows you to toggle, customize, and enable various categories of generated charts. You can then easily navigate and examine the charts’ metrics with mouseover and zoom capabilities.