SolarWinds SQL Sentry vs. Zabbix

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
Zabbix
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Zabbix is an open-source network performance monitoring software. It includes prebuilt official and community-developed templates for integrating with networks, applications, and endpoints, and can automate some monitoring processes.N/A
Pricing
SolarWinds SQL SentryZabbix
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 SentryZabbix
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
Community Pulse
SolarWinds SQL SentryZabbix
Considered Both Products
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry
[SolarWinds] SQL Sentry was tested against multiple monitoring systems, but [it] topped them all as [it] was a monitoring tool that was created to pinpoint SQL Server and nothing else. It has features that a lot of other monitoring systems don't have and are not even developing …
Zabbix

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
SolarWinds SQL SentryZabbix
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
Zabbix
-
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
Best Alternatives
SolarWinds SQL SentryZabbix
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Pulseway
Pulseway
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Redgate SQL Monitor
Redgate SQL Monitor
Score 8.2 out of 10
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Redgate SQL Monitor
Redgate SQL Monitor
Score 8.2 out of 10
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
SolarWinds SQL SentryZabbix
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(102 ratings)
9.0
(25 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.8
(16 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(12 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
7.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.5
(14 ratings)
5.0
(5 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.8
(8 ratings)
8.0
(2 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 SentryZabbix
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.
Read full review
Zabbix
Zabbix is very well suited for infrastructure monitoring i.e. the underlying host servers, basically, compute nodes. However, it has limited FM & PM capabilities for the workloads, i.e., the virtual machines (VMs). Zabbix has an easy-to-use GUI which can be explored easily & provides good filtering of the data.
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.
Read full review
Zabbix
  • Collecting hardware data - CPU, Memory, Network, and Disk Metrics are collected and reported on.
  • Flexible design - It is very easy to build out even very large environments via the templating system. You can also start where you are - network monitoring, server monitoring, etc. and then build it out from there as time and resources permit.
  • Provides a "plugin architecture" (via XML templates) to allow end users to extend it to monitor all kinds of equipment, software, or other metrics that are not already added into the software already.
  • Very complete documentation. Almost every aspect of Zabbix has been documented and reported on.
  • Cost - Zabbix is FOSS software and always free. Support is reasonably priced and readily available.
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.
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Zabbix
  • In a busy Zabbix environment, it can easily overwhelm the underlying database. Plan on having SSDs and a significant server infrastructure to keep up with more than a hundred hosts.
  • Building out Zabbix metrics that suit your environment can be very time consuming. When choosing a monitoring platform like Zabbix, expect a steep learning curve and to invest significant resources to make the tool valuable.
  • This is less important than it has been in the past, but current versions of Zabbix still do not handle IPMI checks of hardware very well. We needed to write our own wrapper for IPMI checks rather than using the built in IPMI poller.
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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
Read full review
Zabbix
It is free. It didn't cost anything to implement (other than my time and the cost incurred for it) and it is filling a badly needed gap in our IT infrastructure. Support is available if we have issues and can be done annually or paid for on a per incident basis as needed. Expansion, updates, and all other future lifecycle activities are likewise free of cost, so as long as someone is able to implement/maintain the software (and the OSS project is maintained) then I imagine the company will never leave it.
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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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Zabbix
If you go deeper than the dashboards, the user friendliness goes away quickly
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.
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Zabbix
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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Zabbix
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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Zabbix
The setup is the most time-consuming portion of using zabbix. It takes a lot of effort to shape it into a usable format and even then it can get very messy. It's not exactly intuitive and as mentioned the UI seems a bit antiquated. If I was to roll out a monitoring solution from scratch, I'd probably look for alternatives which are easier to use and maintain.
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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
Read full review
Zabbix
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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Zabbix
We are a mainly Windows environment, so it would be useful if we could have used Active Directory to deploy agents. As of version 4.2, Zabbix has announced a new agent MSI file to allow exactly that. Unfortunately, we didn't have that option. Also, for Linux and MAC deployments, there is no simple way to deploy that. Using remote scripts you may be able to create something, but most places will opt for either SNMP (agentless) or manual installation of agents to add to Zabbix. A way of deploying agents via discovery would go a long way to helping in the adoption of the tool.
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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.
Read full review
Zabbix
We're using the Solarwinds suite as our global monitoring standard, but it is very complex and its licensing model makes it difficult to monitor a wide range of technologies. So, we're using Zabbix as a complement on our monitoring process. Zabbix is a way more flexible and has free integrations to a wide range of technologies. It is also more 'user friendly' and easy to manage.
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.
Read full review
Zabbix
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
Read full review
Zabbix
  • Zabbix simply makes it easier to identify, and subsequently resolve problems quickly
  • Zabbix gives one web page to look at to see a list of all on-going issue in a single place
  • Zabbix can automate response to alerts. For example, Zabbix allows you the customization to take a monitored server out of production rotation if it is identified as unhealthy
Read full review
ScreenShots

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots

Screenshot of SQL Sentry DeadlocksScreenshot of SQL Sentry Top SQL