Filter Ratings and Reviews
Filter 160 vetted SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer reviews and ratings
Reviews (1-25 of 81)
May 31, 2019
Awesome Database Best Practice
DPA is one of the support tools used by our organization, deployed on some departments where legacy system databases still exist. It empowers our operations when it comes to response time and ability to provide good reporting presentation. I've been in IT Service Delivery and Operation for 10 years, from my experience with different infrastructure and application issues, most of the pain points we've had is the application performance related problems. One of the stories I can share is that it enables us easily detect what is causing bottlenecks and as such good collaboration has emerged with our developers whether the issue lies on our databases or on their codes.
- Maintainability and accommodating Support service and easy to follow Release Notes/Documentation.
- The relevance of the pre-defined Reports and Checks.
- Simplicity of the tool. Easy to use and understand.
- Resiliency of the Monitoring checks after the server underwent maintenance reboot. My experience is the monitor (Action) needs to be started manually. If possible it can automatically detect service/server then start to monitor again when system is back up.
- Much lighter UI.
- Granularity up to minutes.
July 27, 2019
Solar Winds DPA provides the best trend charts
To support performance monitoring for SQL servers across the organization.
- Monitors both SQL query performance and back end VM resources.
- Easy to read trend charts, bottlenecks or spikes show up immediately.
- East to drill-down into specific issues.
- Very good settings for alerts.
- Poor interface for managing alert times or blocking out alerts at times of the week. Very tedious process.
July 27, 2019
SolarWinds DPA should be on every DBA's wishlist.
It is being used to monitor the ERP database, providing insights on performance and long-running queries. The alerts are used to notify of high license usage and deadlock events.
- The alert configuration is very robust, allowing simple OOTB alerts as well as complex query-based alerts.
- Blocking event tracking makes it easy to identify if a user's performance issue is a truly server-related performance problem.
- Historical tracking of queries allows me to easily identify frequently used statements that might need tuning.
- Some of the navigation leads to points that cannot be easily backed out of.
- Some navigation points lead around in circles.
- I would like to see index usage statistics as well as fragmentation.
July 17, 2019
Life saver!
DPA is used to monitor the performance of Oracle and MSQL databases. We added a highly critical system in DPA, and DPA can suggest performance enhancement based on findings over the period, like missing indexes and statistics. Also, during ad-hoc performance issues, this helps to identify the current performance, because of easy access like running a session, blocking, and querying a program that is running.
- Index recommendation.
- Tuning advisor.
- Wait events.
- Always-on monitoring.
June 11, 2019
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
We use this product across the whole organization for multiple applications.
- Easy to use.
- Flexible.
- A good tool to analyze DB performance.
- Needs a more alert setup
- Needs 24/7 support.
June 01, 2019
Awesome Tool for SQL Performance Tuning
It is used by the database team to monitor and tune database performance in both SQL Server and Azure Databases.
- Tells you which statements in which stored procedures need work or are catastrophic (if that applies).
- Helps you focus attention on what really needs work, very efficiently.
- I can't think of any examples for this question.
July 23, 2019
SolarWinds DPA review
It is used as our central database monitoring tool across the whole organization, used especially to improve query performance, resolve blocks and to analyze trends.
- Deep queries analyses, provides good advice for performance improvements.
- Allows us to create our own custom alerts and reports.
- Has a very intuitive and well-explained interface. It is split up for different objectives to analyse or monitor as trends, tunning, current activities and resources.
- None identified
August 02, 2019
Small Teams use of DPA
DPA is being used by the IT and CIM Developers team to monitor our production databases. IT will check the system daily for any signs of issues. Both teams will check when testing or rolling out new systems to ensure the Software is operating as intended. These testing checks are done at least once a week by either department.
- Quickly identifies slow running queries.
- Identifies which database is causing issues on a server.
- Provides an easy to read way of seeing stats on all servers quickly.
- No way to mark a query activity as normal, for example a slow running SPROC that has to be that way.
- Not many options to restrict access.
July 30, 2019
SolarWinds at a large bank as seen from an Engineer
Within our organisation, we use SolarWinds to monitor the most important applications. We give permissions to our customers to view their own data. DPA is saving us on logging in on servers and telling the customer to modify their application (they can see it themselves and fix it themselves). Also it gives us background information on the Virtualization layer and their isseus. It is really helpfull as a first responder to a customer with performance questions.
- monitor databases
- monitor servers
- monitor on virtualisation isseus.
- adding permissions for users or domain groups
- adding boxes is not easy
- being able to remove servers after x month (automagically or via an API)
July 19, 2019
DPA: Great web application for wait stats and trends. Not the tool for those needing actionable alerts.
We use DPA on one team in our department. We have a team of 12 that has access to the tool, although it is mainly just three of us that use it. We do export reports and send to people outside of our team. The tool addresses anomalies that come up across the environment, and patterns before and after changes. We also use it a lot to see what was going on after-hours or when we had an issue come up when no one was available.
- Capturing wait statistics is a great way to monitor performance on a SQL Server instance. This is the main source of info for DPA.
- Web app: no client install required. Easy to login from a web browser, share info and manage everything from a browser tab.
- Drill-downs from one time interval to seconds to see database activity is intuitive and easy to use.
- Alerts seem to be lacking in DPA compared to competitor's tools. They can be setup but are not quite as easy or as helpful as some other tools I have used.
- Grooming/pruning the repository database isn't very easy. We don't manage a lot of instances but our repo DB has grown pretty significantly.
- At times when I am drilled-down to a chart, it can be difficult to navigate around from that point to another time range/query/metric.
June 28, 2019
Happy customers, much time saved
Even though I would consider myself as highly skilled in SQL Server, I found we were spending a lot of our time trying to detect and analyse database performance issues, with varied success. SolarWinds DPA allowed us to almost forget about that entirely, and let us concentrate on the more interesting day to day stuff, sending us emails when things went a bit crazy, and displaying graphs of current activity, which we put on large screens so we can keep half an eye on what's going on.
- Detecting blocking
- Showing missing index information
- Highlighting the most expensive queries being run in your system
- Giving a daily summary of issues
- Showing performance history over a long period of time
- The GUI is a little clunky, could do with updating and make it responsive
- A mobile app would be great, to keep an eye on things on the go
- Perhaps a cut-down version, as sometimes there's just TOO much information!
June 28, 2019
NCTradeToolReview
The product best serves its purpose as it works in the background on databases that we have configured as licensed targets. Having almost 400 databases across many environments and platforms, it assists in allowing me to "watch" the customer databases that are needing to be watched with more than just casual monitoring. It allows me to watch wait-issues across releases of our product specific to that customer. It is an invaluable tool.
- Ability to drill down to wait for the issue and have a clear path as to what may be causing the issue.
- Ability to quickly add a new target and the ease of installation and upgrades.
- Reporting features to group my most troublesome customers into a daily report in one email.
- Excellent customer support on any issues I can't immediately solve.
- At this time it solves all my needs, and it appears that your folks have the pulse of this tool as the releases always give me something better to use.
DPA is currently used by our development and support team to monitor our core database to keep an eye on performance day to day to avoid any rogue queries or new application causing issues for our business as a whole. In the early days of our business platform it was used to refine our queries to provide a better user experience.
- Highlights abnormal query performance
- Provides historical base line
- Gives detailed insight and these days recommendations on how to improve performance
- Not be written in JAVA and run on Apache
- Upgrades are always a problem for us
June 19, 2019
DPA -- The Wait stats king
DPA is a great tool if you are looking for a performance monitoring solution for your database servers. It's intuitive to use, and it can be used to pinpoint the root cause of a performance issue -- both during and after the event. It can highlight the specific statement within a stored procedure that is causing a performance issue, and capture the query plan to allow detailed analysis of the issue. It captures various useful performance counters, and you can add your own custom metrics, but it's the wait analysis where this tool really shines.
- The best tool for wait analysis.
- A simple, intuitive web interface.
- A quality product that is improving over time.
- The wait analysis at the statement level has it's pros/cons. I would like to see higher level stored procedure.
- It's a good performance monitoring tool, but not good for monitoring health -- backups, log shipping etc.
- The query plan viewer in the web is only good for simple query plans. It's easy to download the plan to view in SSMS, Plan Explorer, etc. though.
June 10, 2019
Great alternative for Oracle Enterprise Manager
We're using SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer on a daily basis for:
- monitoring our Oracle RAC performance
- searching for performance bottlenecks
- analyzing historical data and trends
- solving developers problems
- It's super helpful when hunting down problems with performance.
- It's easy to install and configure.
- It doesn't require crazy computation power or tons of memory.
- DBA-friendly.
- GUI/UI could be more modern.
- Pricing: it's reasonable but not cheap.
- Deep integration with AWS managed databases would be really nice.
June 07, 2019
Try it out if you want happy customers
We use it across our department to monitor our database landscape. We have different flavors of databases across our landscape, and SolarWinds for years has been an important part of the strategy for our monitoring solutions for the database tier across the landscape. It is very intuitive and quite easy to implement.
- Immediate bottlenecks on the database tier.
- Performance tuning.
- Historical reports.
- More details around the specific alerts which are raised on the console should be considered.
- More information from a host layer monitoring could be handy as well.
- A single layout for the report for all the different instances of DPA would be really handy. It is just tedious to go granular for all the instances across the landscape.
June 07, 2019
My DPA-review
I am the only user of the department that uses SolarWids Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) almost every day. I use DPA for monitoring a single Oracle production database, and gets alerts when it does not perform or when it's unavailable to the users. The monitoring also pinpoints which SQL statements needs tuning, which I can correct before the problems get serious.
DPA makes it possible for me to be proactive. I find the DPA-GUI to be very user-friendly and easy to understand even without reading the manual.
DPA makes it possible for me to be proactive. I find the DPA-GUI to be very user-friendly and easy to understand even without reading the manual.
- SQL-tuning advice. It's easy to locate the most inefficient SQL-staements as they are all graded. You just click and drill-down to see both the SQL-statements and statistics. That info will most likely give you enough knowledge to solve the issue, for example by adding an extra index.
- The monitoring of the database by setting up your own alerts in all kind of categories. For example, alerts when tablespaces are running full or when disk/CPU load are too high or if the server becomes unavailable.
- The possibilty to browse the repository and see trends. You can see exactly when problems are starting and see if the changes you make has an effect in the time to come.
- The license-management seems difficult to use, and I always find that I need to contact SolarWinds when upgrading server, etc.
June 02, 2019
Great tool for a DBA
DPA is primarily being used as a monitoring tool for our main production Oracle database. It helps to pinpoint problems or potential problems without effort. It replaces different Oracle monitoring tools and operating system resource monitoring tools (these tools are still used later in the troubleshooting process). It is also being used as an SQL tuning advisor.
- Shows the database status in a single page.
- Enables simple drilling into different database problem areas (CPU, ram, disks, sessions, etc.).
- Regularly finds top queries that can be improved.
- It would be nice if it could work with Oracle's SQL Tuning Advisor.
September 25, 2019
Best Database Performance Tool
We use it to monitor and performance-tune some of our in-house developed applications. Some of these applications are tier-one applications.
- Track historical performance.
- Isolate the issue by providing a specific area of query impacting performance.
- Can track which user is causing the issue.
- Provides quick indexes where it makes sense.
- Auto tuning - It doesn't have the ability to implement the changes like Oracle Enterprise Manager.
- DPA free version is good but fully functional version should be allowed free for a limited number of instances to give users the ability to try functions without a need to make a purchase.
May 28, 2019
Best product for tuning performance issues
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is being used by DevOps and MDO teams to troubleshoot issues and get an Idea on Load on the system, bottleneck and find culprit rogues queries and SQL to solve issues.
- Ease of use.
- Graphical presentation of load and system information.
- You can edit, rename, and customize the SQL queries that are run often to facilitate identifying them later.
- It would be great if it has a pulse page that summarizes the state of the environment as a whole.
- If it can be integrated with other applications like OEM.
- If it can monitor replication as well.
May 27, 2019
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Review
We use it at the data warehousing and analytics group to monitor the load and set up alerts on the data warehouse server. We have set up alerts on long-running queries, blocking other queries, deadlocks, instance availability, unused indexes, etc. Some of them are very useful, but the deadlocks alert can be improved to show what queries were in the deadlock, so we can improve our solution.
- We have set up alerts on long-running queries, blocking other queries, deadlocks, instance availability, unused indexes, etc.
- The status summary is useful to see the load on the server.
- Deadlocks alert can be improved to show what queries were in the deadlock, so we can improve our solution.
- Deadlocks alert can be improved to show what queries were in the deadlock, so we can improve our solution.
- We never got to setup https using the documentation provided by solar winds. We still keep getting https error when we access our DPA site.
- A better technical customer service would help.
May 20, 2019
A must have for critical SQL workloads
We use SW DPA to monitor the most critical database servers in the company. It provides an interesting slicing and dicing of performance metrics which enables us to use to plan and react to the servers' needs.
- Very easy to deploy with a negligible performance overhead.
- Excellent perspective on overall performance metrics.
- Good alerting system for performance or events.
- API based alerting.
May 20, 2019
Network Sherlock Holmes
I use SolarWinds to monitor our ERP and other application's database health and load. It helps us fine-tune the performance issues.
- Detailed minute by minute performance data.
- It gives a detailed performance insight at the server and application-level.
- Analytics and problem alerting.
- None that I can think of at the moment. It has what I expected out of a monitoring tool.
June 03, 2019
Useful database monitoring tool
The primary purpose that we use Database Performance Analyzer for is to monitor database instances. We also use it for Query performance analysis. We also use it for performance analysis. For our application, we monitor primarily the index advisory/recommendations.
- We use this software to identify real-time performance problems such as errors, long-running queries or problems that are blocking the system.
- We use this software to review previous SQL Server queries/performance.
- When there is an issue with any Server and I need to quickly narrow down to the right place of the root cause, this is a tool that allows me to focus on the right places and remove all sorts of noise from our data.
- Cannot easily find a query using a "text search" without detailed knowledge of the underlying SQL database "repository" that is used to display the data in each product.
- On the ad-hoc plan tab, for any given plan we have to drill down each SQL manually one by one. It would be goOd to have some kind of summary popup/tool-tip when we hover over the plan in DPA.
May 01, 2019
DPA: FTW.
We use DPA to manage a very large and somewhat cranky SQL environment for ambulatory healthcare end users (from providers and office managers to assistants and front desk personnel). The DB schema dates to the 1990s and requires regular supervision and management at a level the system vendor doesn't provide. Addressed problems include plan management, index addition and revision, partitioning and troubleshooting poor performance.
- Near-instantaneous feedback on problem queries
- Allows us to evaluate changes in the application or its stored procedures over time
- We can drill down to the end-user level to identify potential issues, important with > 2000 sessions daily
- Can't think of any feature or ops related issues. Prior complaints have all been addressed in newer updates.
- Only main complaint is cost -- we would adopt for other servers if the incremental cost wasn't so high for a few additional instances (we have 3 servers we would like to use DPA with, but can't justify the x3 pricing per instance).
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Scorecard Summary
About SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) enables deep visibility into database performance and expert advice for performance optimization and tuning.
What can you monitor with DPA?
- Oracle
- Oracle Exadata
- Oracle EBS
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure SQL Database Managed Instance
- MySQL
- DB2
- SAP ASE
- Aurora
- MariaDB
What makes DPA stand out:
- Quick, easy, and reliable performance
troubleshooting available in real time and historically
- Machine learning anomaly analysis to bring intelligence to go beyond traditional threshold based analysis
- Find inefficient workloads, aggregated by table, for indexing opportunities—an “X marks the spot” tuning analysis
- Cross-platform database support for a single-pane-of-glass view into your environment
- Blocking analysis: what is blocking and a hierarchy of what is being blocked, plus overall impact
- PerfStack™ integration with other SolarWinds products for more complete visibility (applications, servers, storage, hypervisor, network, and more)
- Agent-less architecture with the ability to scale from a few instances to thousands, low 1% average overhead
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Screenshots
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Video
Database Performance Analyzer - Overview
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Downloadables
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Integrations
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, Solarwinds® Storage Resource Monitor, SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Netflow Traffic Analyzer, SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager, SolarWinds IP Address Manager, SolarWinds VoIP and Network Quality Manager, Solarwinds Web Performance Monitor, SolarWinds User Device Tracker
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Competitors
Pricing
Has featureFree Trial Available?Yes
Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
Does not have featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?No
Entry-level set up fee?Optional
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Support Options
| Free Version | Paid Version | |
|---|---|---|
| Phone | ||
| Forum/Community | ||
| FAQ/Knowledgebase | ||
| Video Tutorials / Webinar |
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Technical Details
| Deployment Types: | On-premise, SaaS |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems: | Windows, AWS Marketplace app |
| Mobile Application: | No |