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SolarWinds SQL Sentry

Score10 out of 10

163 Reviews and Ratings

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What is SolarWinds SQL Sentry?

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 Services (SSAS)
  • SQL Server on Hyper-V or VMware VMs (including host)
  • SQL Server on Azure SQL Database Managed Instance
  • SQL Server on Amazon RDS
  • SQL Server on Amazon EC2
  • SQL Server on Linux

Although a SQL Sentry license can be used to monitor Azure SQL Database in a hybrid environment, dedicated licensing is available for large Azure SQL Database environments.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

SQL Sentry Deadlocks
SQL Sentry Top SQL

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Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features SolarWinds SQL Sentry has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 163 ratings of SolarWinds SQL Sentry's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Performance dashboard

    Dashboard displays consolidated data with drill-down capability

    Category average: 9.1

  • Virtualization support

    Root cause analysis for virtual platforms like VMWare or Hyper-V

    Category average: 8.4

  • Top SQL

    Details about any long-running or high impact statements

    Category average: 8.6

Areas for Improvement

  • Historical trend data

    Historical trends and anomalies for SQL tuning

    Category average: 8.6

  • Intelligent alerting

    Customizable alerts and reports indicating outlier values from baseline

    Category average: 7.9

Reviews

What users are saying about SolarWinds SQL Sentry.
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While expensive SQL Sentry is the most complete proactive monitoring and reactive troubleshooting tool I've used for SQL Server

Incentivized
Andrew GouldView profile
Manager of Data Services in Information Technology at Integrated DNA Technologies (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • While creating Advisory Conditions is extremely flexible it can be a bit challenging to get everything correct. Some sort of interactive tutorial would be really helpful.
  • The alert messages are very detailed, but it takes a bit to learn how to parse them. Some sort of enriched HTML format would be a nice quality of life improvement.
  • There are half a million configurable options in multiple places. Some sort of search feature would be fantastic.

Alternatives Considered

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server, Redgate SQL Monitor and SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Other Software Used

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server, Redgate SQL Compare, Redgate SQL Data Compare, Redgate SQL Monitor

Why Switch to SQL Sentry?

Incentivized
Mark LessardView profile
Associate Director of Database Architecture in Information Technology at Merkleinc (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Collecting and rolling up SQL statements with the associated plan. The ability to see aggregate and individual execution of SQL statements along with the associated plan is key in rapid diagnosis of bad plans. Bad plans are the most common performance issue we see in the big data environment.
  • The ability to drill into disk IO. Being able to easily see IO per a file can help identify issues with slow / stressed storage and or poorly distributed tables.
  • Easily focus on time-frame. Being able to click and drag to select a time frame to analyze from a prior time frame keeps maintains the flow of troubleshooting.
  • Alerting is inherited and highly configurable.
  • The collection can be distributed over multiple servers allowing scaling out horizontally and fault tolerance.
  • AD roles can be used in configuring access to the subsets of the servers being monitored. Access can be configured such that adding a user to an Active Directory role will provide access to just the servers then need to see. This works very well for our client specific operations.

Cons

  • The presentation of SQL server waits needs work. A large value on a throw away wait like cxpacket will change the scale such that an important wait like sos_schedular _yield is not readable. I have been told this is being addressed in the next release.
  • Installation of the client requires sysadmin access on the repository server for the initial install. Once the install is complete sysadmin can be removed.
  • There is a web interface but this does not have much of the functionality yet.
  • I have not found a way to view page splits over time.

Alternatives Considered

Diagnostic Manager

Other Software Used

Microsoft SQL Server, SQL Server Integration Services, IBM Netezza Data Warehouse Appliances, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance

Return on Investment

  • Far less time is spent on resolving performance issues and the data to perform forensic analysis.
  • the ability to address SLA violations with data.

Usability

Sentry One a comprehensive monitoring tool

Incentivized
Prashant BHolane
Software Engineer in Information Technology at Prime TSR (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Problem detection
  • Alerts
  • Graphs

Cons

  • High resource usage
  • Calendar take time to load
  • incomplete execution plan

Alternatives Considered

SolarWinds AppOptics

Other Software Used

SolarWinds AppOptics, Azure DevOps Server (formerly Team Foundation Server), Jenkins

SQL Sentry - Best of Breed

Derek KnutsenView profile
Database Administrator in Information Technology at American Health Network (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • The unique offering is the graphical chaining of jobs. This is especially important when the job chain spans servers.
  • The graphs in the dashboard gives easy to follow and quick information as to the status of the database system.
  • The timeline of the job execution has been handy when seeing how long a job has executed or when a scheduled job could cause conflicts.

Cons

  • I wish there was a better way to determine what queries are running at a given time. This could be a resource problem, but I found myself going to profiler a lot.
  • Configuration of alerts is not intuitive. I want to create an alert for low disk space, but the interface was too obtuse.
  • Navigation is also not intuitive. You have to fumble around the tree structure to get to things like the job timeline.

Alternatives Considered

Redgate SQL Monitor and Idera

Other Software Used

Microsoft SQL Server

Return on Investment

  • Far faster identification of issues
  • Visibility into our databases
  • Tracking performance improvements
  • Easily managing jobs

SentryOne Product Review

Kevin R. ZakoskiView profile
Database Engineer III in Information Technology at LTCG (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • It has an easy to use interface/dashboard; it doesn't require a lot training or reading to get information. Most of the key counters are on the main dashboard and the rest of the data you're looking for is usually just a tab away.
  • Historical information: By the time I get the call, the system is usually back to normal, so having the ability to look back in time and pinpoint when problems started is essential for us when determining the root cause of problems.
  • One tool: Not only can it determine what is causing the issue, SentryOne also captures the detail and plans for code being executed. It allow me to drill into the plans and get down to the nitty gritty code all within one interface. No need to buy additional tools or load into Management Studio to get more details.

Cons

  • 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.

Other Software Used

Redgate SQL Compare

Return on Investment

  • Reduction of P1 events due to better visibility of what's running and causing the issues. Also reducing downtime when issues do arise.
  • Reduced hardware costs - right-sizing VM's based on running loads vs. specualtion
  • Better customer experience by finding inefficiencies in underlying code that's been enhanced and now performing better.

Usability

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