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https://dudodiprj2sv7.cloudfront.net/product-logos/XS/vW/GVXHMOPCOTRN.JPEGSentryOneSQL Sentry adds real value for SQL Managed Service providers2019-02-26T17:49:33.430ZWe use SQL Sentry to provide an agreeable set of monitoring metrics and results which we use as part of our consulting toolset for MS SQL server.
It also forms the basis of our alerting and monitoring framework that we deploy for our clients.,Easy to implement
Great knowledge base
Excellent support,I'd like some customisable branding for reports
Having a customisable time allocation table to map alerts to an estimated, predefined chunk of time allotted to resolve the alert,10,Getting notified on SQL configuration enhancement opportunities has allowed us to more efficiently use hardware resources allocated to our SQL servers. This has greatly benefitted both us and our clients.
Having historic execution plans greatly speeds up our performance tuning related to the most resource intensive queries.
Our clients are finding noticeable improvements in application performance, which directly relates to optimisations based on SQL Sentry's output.,When troubleshooting performance issues on a SQL server we exhausted our normal tuning methods. We turned to SQL Sentry and found from monitoring data that this server was seeing a very high amount of Context Switches.
This information pointed us to SQL server MAXDOP settings and VM CPU configuration issues.
We would not have been able to find this information easily without using SQL Sentry to find the root cause.,SQL Diagnostic Manager,SQL Diagnostic ManagerAdrian SullivanSentryOne is an Awesome Product2018-10-09T17:24:01.351ZWe use SentryOne in our production (over 120 Instance worldwide and growing). It gives us an easy way to navigate the dashboard to quickly identify a performance problem and the ability to drill into the issue quickly and come up with a game plan to address the performance problem.,Alerting is very flexible and configurable to our needs
Linking alerting into third party alerting tools via PowerShell was easy
Collecting and rolling up SQL statements make it much easier to troubleshoot performance problems
Drilling into PLE and what’s happening when it drops out
Ease of drilling into time-frame to figure out what was the issue at that time
Being able to query the SentryOne database for management reports is awesome (Deadlocks and Blocking),Navigation could be improved. It can be hard to follow if you are new to the tool
Calendar of events could use some work. Display can be confusing at times,9,Reports are good but could use some improvement. For example, maybe show Friendly Name.,One time we deployed a new feature to our product, and it was causing over 88,000 plus long running queries over 2 seconds (in a one-day period) and we found the root cause to the issue in minutes. It turns out it was a missing indexing. So, to have a tool like SentryOne to help us identify this issue was great, and resolving the client’s issue within minutes of the performance problem was amazing.,Solarwinds Database Performance Analyzer for SQL Server, Redgate SQL MonitorLouis FritzSQL Sentry Review2018-11-23T17:26:29.052ZSQL Sentry is being used to monitor SQL Server performance across our entire organization, providing trending, alerting, and helping us solve the "death by a thousand cuts" types of issues that are more of a challenge to pinpoint.,SQL Agent Jobs runtime trending and alerting - out of the box alerts runtime deviations send alerts.
Ad hoc trending against a previous week, day, or sampling period - pretty colors with ranges and averages to share with others.
Reporting against multiple counters - this is available to compare time periods as well.,I'd like to see a "Response Time" - measuring/tracking 'Select 1' out of the box instead of having to add a custom counter.
There is so much functionality in the product that we need additional training to more fully utilize it. For many DBAs this type granularity is preferred over simplicity - I'd rather have more options than too few in a monitoring product.,10,Comparing performance levels prior to an outage and sharing graphs of the same has provided risk mitigation.
Finding bottlenecks during load testing.
Forecasting storage usage.,During load testing we were able to quickly find the specific stored procedure that was causing the highest cumulative execution time in a specific time range using SQL Sentry.,Dell Spotlight and Foglight,Microsoft SQL Server, Redgate SQL Compare, SlackLars RasmussenSQL Sentry Review2016-05-11T18:22:08.149ZI work as a consultant and this tool is used by my clients to monitor production (dev/test in some cases) servers. Monitoring and alerting (PA and EM) is used. Fragmentation manager etc., is handled via other scripts.,Easy to set up and navigate.
Provides some very important/useful metrics for performance monitoring.
Custom conditions is an excellent addition to the product.,I understand that the product requires a certain level of knowledge to interpret the results but I believe tooltips on certain areas could be useful for companies that do not have this knowledge but would like to have their systems monitored and reviewed.,10,HIghlighting problem queries/procedures
Areas of bottlenecks,Slow system reported, review history of that time period and pick out the top SQL,,Redgate SQL Monitor,1,1,Performance monitoring
Alerting
Storage forecasting,Data taken from the database to calculate "a magic number" which is an arbitrary figure to give us an easy indication as to how performance had been over the last week, day, hour etc
It's like the server health but a bit more in depth analysis (at the query level) is done to calculate,PowerBI performance dashboards,Easy analysis of performance issues meaning a lot of time is saved to work on other tasks,10,No,Price
Product Features
Product Usability
Prior Experience with the Product
Existing Relationship with the Vendor,I wouldn't,Implemented in-house,No,Change management was minimal,None,10,8,No,I know they guys based in England so any questions I have guess to them. If they can't answer straight away which is unlikely then a support request is raised,Main performance dashboard is legendary. Everything you need (90% of the time) is there right in front of you.,I sometimes find the Advisory Conditions difficult to get my head around,Yes, but I don't use it,9Chris TaylorThe closest thing to time travel you will experience in SQL Server2016-02-12T19:56:09.489ZWe specifically purchased SQL Sentry Performance Advisor out of the need to resolve performance issues on one of our SQL clusters. It was difficult to troubleshoot the issues after they had occurred and SQL Sentry allowed us to review the performance over a period of time and specifically go back to when an issue occurred to troubleshoot. We now use this for the majority of our SQL estate and specifically for IT Department only.,Historical analysis of performance counters - you can go back in time or over a range to see what was happening to the server
Review Top SQL and Blocking - You can see at a specific moment in time what queries are running and even review historical blocking.
Baselining - Ability to set your own baselines, so you can compare what is on screen to what you expect
Read only views - You can grant read only access to users, allowing us to grant support teams the ability to review the dashboards as well.,If a server is maxing out and unable to allow the service to record then you can get blackouts in the data. This is a risk of running as a service, but then you have bigger problems to deal with if that has occurred.,10,The tool has been invaluable with analysing performance issues. Being able to locate what blocking processes occurred overnight to resolve them via scheduling jobs at different times or rewriting stored procedures to run more effectively.
Great for analysis and to be able to send information to vendors as to why their applications might be deadlocking or running ineffectively if it is missing indexes or statistics are not up to date,Fairly recently we had a performance issue with a SQL Server consuming 100% CPU, with the performance advisor we was able to pin point the specific queries that were a problem and advise the vendor. Which lead the vendor to make recommendations and changes to their tables and jobs. This resolved the performance issue.,Idera SQL Diagnostic Manager,System Center Operations Manager,10,Yes,Their technical sales reps are amazing, some are even Microsoft MVPs. We have had times when you might have a what if question, or even a specific SQL server question and they will always helpfully respond. One of the better vendors out there getting it right by prioritising the customers satisfaction over everything else. Always a pleasure speaking with any of the staff both on and off topic of SentryOne.Verified UserWindows
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SQL Sentry
126 Ratings
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Reviews (1-25 of 72)
February 26, 2019
Review: "SQL Sentry adds real value for SQL Managed Service providers"
Senior SQL Engineer
Lexel Systems LimitedInformation Technology and Services, 51-200 employees
We use SQL Sentry to provide an agreeable set of monitoring metrics and results which we use as part of our consulting toolset for MS SQL server.
It also forms the basis of our alerting and monitoring framework that we deploy for our clients.
It also forms the basis of our alerting and monitoring framework that we deploy for our clients.
- Easy to implement
- Great knowledge base
- Excellent support
- I'd like some customisable branding for reports
- Having a customisable time allocation table to map alerts to an estimated, predefined chunk of time allotted to resolve the alert
SQL Sentry is amazing at getting information relating to the state of SQL servers. Alerts and issues are easy to consume as an action list.
When troubleshooting performance issues on a SQL server we exhausted our normal tuning methods. We turned to SQL Sentry and found from monitoring data that this server was seeing a very high amount of Context Switches.
This information pointed us to SQL server MAXDOP settings and VM CPU configuration issues.
We would not have been able to find this information easily without using SQL Sentry to find the root cause.
This information pointed us to SQL server MAXDOP settings and VM CPU configuration issues.
We would not have been able to find this information easily without using SQL Sentry to find the root cause.
October 09, 2018
SQL Sentry Review: "SentryOne is an Awesome Product"
Computer Software, 501-1000 employees
We use SentryOne in our production (over 120 Instance worldwide and growing). It gives us an easy way to navigate the dashboard to quickly identify a performance problem and the ability to drill into the issue quickly and come up with a game plan to address the performance problem.
- Alerting is very flexible and configurable to our needs
- Linking alerting into third party alerting tools via PowerShell was easy
- Collecting and rolling up SQL statements make it much easier to troubleshoot performance problems
- Drilling into PLE and what’s happening when it drops out
- Ease of drilling into time-frame to figure out what was the issue at that time
- Being able to query the SentryOne database for management reports is awesome (Deadlocks and Blocking)
- Navigation could be improved. It can be hard to follow if you are new to the tool
- Calendar of events could use some work. Display can be confusing at times
It’s great for a DBA to have a tool like SentryOne. To be able to troubleshoot our production environment and come up with a root cause to a performance issue in very little time is awesome. Being able to drill into an instance and see what happened yesterday when a user walks up to our desk and tells us the instance was slow yesterday and they want to know what was going on.
One time we deployed a new feature to our product, and it was causing over 88,000 plus long running queries over 2 seconds (in a one-day period) and we found the root cause to the issue in minutes. It turns out it was a missing indexing. So, to have a tool like SentryOne to help us identify this issue was great, and resolving the client’s issue within minutes of the performance problem was amazing.
November 23, 2018
"SQL Sentry Review"
Senior Database Administrator
Solera, Inc.Computer Software, 5001-10,000 employees
SQL Sentry is being used to monitor SQL Server performance across our entire organization, providing trending, alerting, and helping us solve the "death by a thousand cuts" types of issues that are more of a challenge to pinpoint.
- SQL Agent Jobs runtime trending and alerting - out of the box alerts runtime deviations send alerts.
- Ad hoc trending against a previous week, day, or sampling period - pretty colors with ranges and averages to share with others.
- Reporting against multiple counters - this is available to compare time periods as well.
- I'd like to see a "Response Time" - measuring/tracking 'Select 1' out of the box instead of having to add a custom counter.
- There is so much functionality in the product that we need additional training to more fully utilize it. For many DBAs this type granularity is preferred over simplicity - I'd rather have more options than too few in a monitoring product.
SQL Sentry is more suited to managing SQL Server performance issues in an enterprise environment. If you are a small shop it may not be the best fit due to cost.
During load testing we were able to quickly find the specific stored procedure that was causing the highest cumulative execution time in a specific time range using SQL Sentry.
March 15, 2019
"SQL Sentry Review"
Director
Jarrin Consultancy Ltd.Insurance, 1-10 employees
I work as a consultant and this tool is used by my clients to monitor production (dev/test in some cases) servers. Monitoring and alerting (PA and EM) is used. Fragmentation manager etc., is handled via other scripts.
- Easy to set up and navigate.
- Provides some very important/useful metrics for performance monitoring.
- Custom conditions is an excellent addition to the product.
- I understand that the product requires a certain level of knowledge to interpret the results but I believe tooltips on certain areas could be useful for companies that do not have this knowledge but would like to have their systems monitored and reviewed.
I know virtualisation monitoring is available with future work in the pipeline but at present this is an area that I would like to see improved.
Slow system reported, review history of that time period and pick out the top SQL
March 12, 2019
SQL Sentry Review: "The closest thing to time travel you will experience in SQL Server"
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Legal Services Company, 1001-5000 employeesWe specifically purchased SQL Sentry Performance Advisor out of the need to resolve performance issues on one of our SQL clusters. It was difficult to troubleshoot the issues after they had occurred and SQL Sentry allowed us to review the performance over a period of time and specifically go back to when an issue occurred to troubleshoot. We now use this for the majority of our SQL estate and specifically for IT Department only.
- Historical analysis of performance counters - you can go back in time or over a range to see what was happening to the server
- Review Top SQL and Blocking - You can see at a specific moment in time what queries are running and even review historical blocking.
- Baselining - Ability to set your own baselines, so you can compare what is on screen to what you expect
- Read only views - You can grant read only access to users, allowing us to grant support teams the ability to review the dashboards as well.
- If a server is maxing out and unable to allow the service to record then you can get blackouts in the data. This is a risk of running as a service, but then you have bigger problems to deal with if that has occurred.
SQL Sentry can be utilised for both performance monitoring and alerting. It is good if you need to analyse performance issues whether in production or in development. Easily can export stats to send to vendors where applications are not performing well. And can setup alert thresholds that can send emails to support teams or write out to SCOM or the event log.
Fairly recently we had a performance issue with a SQL Server consuming 100% CPU, with the performance advisor we was able to pin point the specific queries that were a problem and advise the vendor. Which lead the vendor to make recommendations and changes to their tables and jobs. This resolved the performance issue.
May 21, 2018
User Review: "SQL Sentry is a Great Product"
Systems Administrator/DBA/ERP Specialist
Nicolet CollegeHigher Education, 51-200 employees
We use SQL Sentry to monitor our production ERP databases. It allows easy tuning checkup, configurable emails to alert you to conditions that require attention, and offers insights into SQL that are difficult and time consuming to duplicate with SQL Management Studio.
- Alerts me quickly to SQL Blocking and record locks via email, providing offending SQL and users involved.
- Provides an easy to monitor performance index and common issues that affect it.
- Alerts me to missed tasks, malfunctioning tasks, etc., via email. Really comes in handy when doing MS/Windows updates as I know exactly what was missed when the server was involved in the updates.
- Don't fix too much, it works very well as delivered. Changes made for the sake of change often make a great product into a good product.
- Tech support is great and easy to get to, but a little more development on the help screens in the product could save you some work.
- I'd like to see licensing modified to allow you to monitor one production environment and one test environment. That would be tricky from your perspective, but you are a crafty lot and I'm thinking you could come up with a way to tell if I was monitoring duplicate databases or two entirely different data environments.
- Repeat, do not change too much, this product is great and a good value.
Unless you really don't care about performance and reliability, I can't imagine a SQL environment which would not benefit from SQL Sentry.
We've had a few cases with unexpected blocking, but due to our ability to quickly narrow it to a specific time and specific SQL objects involved, we were able to determine the cause was not something developed inhouse, but a vendor customization. It was easy to duplicate with the info we had, so we were able to prove it to the vendor quickly and get them to warranty it rather than play the "he said, she said, ...." game.
January 12, 2018
User Review: "Why Switch to SQL Sentry?"
Associate Director of Database Architecture
MerkleincMarketing and Advertising, 1001-5000 employees
SQL Sentry is being used to monitor 260 SQL instances across or enterprise. We are in the process of integrating the alerting capabilities with SCOM via SNMP. Along with alerting SS greatly increase our efficiency in resolving ongoing and past performance issues. SS also provides a central repository for reporting at the enterprise and client level. We previously used a competitors tool for 7 years but moved to SQL Sentry due to the products inability to function in our environment and more so a lack of response to the issues we were experiencing by the vendor. Our experience with SQL Sentry support has been excellent to date.
- 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.
- 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.
I only see one scenario for this type of tool. I want all tools in this category to collect OS and SQL performance metrics over a time frame and present and or alert on them in a way that allows me to diagnose availability and performance issues on the servers. I need this information in real time and historically. I need to be able to report on this information at the micro and macro level. I need a tool that just works and a company that stands behind there tool. SQL Sentry meets these needs.
The only scenario I see were SQL Sentry would not work is were purchase cost of the product is weighted very heavily as opposed to all other factors.
The only scenario I see were SQL Sentry would not work is were purchase cost of the product is weighted very heavily as opposed to all other factors.
A common experience is the SQL optimizer choosing to use a loop join on a large join. We see this even after stats update with full-scan on the associated tables. We have tried the optimizer trace flag.
Process.
Find the SQL statement in Top SQL
Look at the historical run times/plans grid. Notice run time and color of dot. High run-time and different color, you have a bad plan.
Open the plan to review operators
Add hash join query option or join hints. I know this is not best practices according to MS, but the trade-offs in our OLAP environment make it the best choice.
Process.
Find the SQL statement in Top SQL
Look at the historical run times/plans grid. Notice run time and color of dot. High run-time and different color, you have a bad plan.
Open the plan to review operators
Add hash join query option or join hints. I know this is not best practices according to MS, but the trade-offs in our OLAP environment make it the best choice.
November 28, 2017
SQL Sentry: "SentryOne Brief Review"
Database Administrator
J. Spargo & AssociatesEvents Services, 51-200 employees
We have been using SQL Sentry exclusively in our database department. Occasionally our technical leads join our analysis and troubleshooting sessions. We run screen shares in those sessions to solve application performance related issues. We have used SQL Sentry analyzing and researching long running SQL queries and deadlock issues, which have become major bottlenecks in our application development processes. The software has helped us address missing index issues and optimize query performances. In the past, we were also able to make a few important design decisions based on the analysis and statistics that were provided by SQL Sentry monitoring service. Decisions that include when and where to use application or database caching mechanism, as well as the benefit of implementing ad-hoc queries versus stored procedures. It has also helped our QA department to identify most key issues in our load tests.
- Top running SQL - gives statistical information about long running queries as well the ability to customize filters.
- Deadlock - provides detailed graphical analysis on deadlock chains and involving parties. It is very intuitive and easy to pin point the cause of deadlocks.
- Baseline tuning - provides both sampling and historical trending information on SQL servers as well as detailed statistical information about resources utilization.
- Calendar of events - a centralized place for reviewing SQL agent jobs.
- Condition list - set of conditions that can be customized for business requirements.
- It would be nice if the reports can be interactive like drill down, clickable content, etc.
- Navigation could improve and become more intuitive.
- Calendar of events could also improve - wish the date and time range could be specified instead of just by day or interval.
SQL Sentry is well suited in a professional environment where experienced DBAs are available. It requires some learning curve to understand all the counters and measures before one can started troubleshooting SQL server issues. This product may not benefit companies that have only a few servers to manage. Larger companies should benefit more as the product is a huge time saver when DBAs have to manage a cluster of SQL servers.
One time during the application launch, we have discovered a site not responding due to heavy load on the web server. In New Relic we saw the application process that took a long time to respond but couldn't figure out the root cause. By looking into SQL sentry Top SQL tab, we immediately identified that a stored procedure that was designed to lookup information across database that had been timing out. We were able to address it immediately and prevented the site from shutting down.
November 14, 2017
Review: "SQL Sentry is the best performance monitoring tool on the market!!!"
Manager of Data Services (Contract)
WageDayAdvanceFinancial Services, 51-200 employees
SQL Sentry is used currently on our live platform to mange SQL performance which makes debugging issues much easier. We are looking to also implement this into our test environments so we can see the effect caused by releases at a more granular level.
- Easy and simple use of the performance dashboard to see issues straight away.
- TOP SQL viewer to see current blocking and long running queries.
- HADR graph to see if there are any latency between primary and secondaries.
- All changes are addressed by sentryone and in the past we have had these added into a new version.
When we are getting techincal live issues on the website SQL Sentry is the first tool I use and the majority of times its the only thing I need to look at.
We were getting performance issues after a release which turned out to be indexes not covering new columns. We were able to see which procs caused the issues and the plans associated to them. We were able to quickly amend some indexes to cover the procs.
November 28, 2017
SQL Sentry Review: "Great product but failed the "We're already familiar with it" test"
Verified User
Partner in Information Technology
Retail Company, 10,001+ employeesWe were testing it as a possible replacement for the current monitoring tool but unfortunately some members of the team were too stuck on their old monitoring tool.
- It allowed me to drill into the memory being used by the different NUMA nodes very easily, the old tool did not.
- The default view shows Memory Grants Pending and that's an extremely useful item of information, better than PLE in my opinion.
- It's very easy to customize the alerts and create custom ones.
- I would like to see a better default screen that shows the high-level status of all monitored instances in a single view. What is there isn't good enough as the color coding can be hard to see.
It doesn't work well in highly compartmentalized environments, as in, firewall issues can be hard to work through.
As stated earlier, it showed us that the multiple SQL Server instances on NUMA architecture weren't using all available memory so we affinitized the processors and the instances were able to use all the memory on the machine and performance was improved.
August 28, 2017
SQL Sentry Review: "Best tool to monitor SQL Server"
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering
Computer Software Company, 5001-10,000 employeesIt's being used by a department. It addresses the quick pinpoint and resolution of any spike in resource utilization and there by avoiding impact to customer response time.
- Professional graphical interface.
- Zoom into deep dive into issues.
- Ability to create a baseline and generate alerts on baseline deviation.
- Check historical information on specific SQL
- Give overall advice post installation on tools on low hanging fruits which can be fixed right away
Across all the tools available in the market for SQL server, I would SentryOne is head of the competitors.
Right on day 1 of install. The prod CPU spiked to 90% and we were able to know the cause right away.
January 13, 2017
User Review: "SQL Sentry - Best of Breed"
Database Administrator
American Health NetworkHospital & Health Care, 1001-5000 employees
Currently, we use SQL Sentry to monitor database performance and debug issues as they arise. I open up the dashboard for our production environment at the start of each day. We also use it to run our complicated weekly job that spans four servers. This job calls one server and then calls back to the originating server.
- 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.
- 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.
SQL Sentry is good for overall monitoring and job configuration. There are capabilities for deep-dive troubleshooting. However, it is highly recommended to get training. Be prepared for a steep learning curve on how to get the system configured the way you want it. But, it is worth it. Do not expect this to be an all in one solution. This will not take care of backups.
We were seeing regular spikes in CPU on our production environment. SQL Sentry identified these are coming from a Java process. The queries looked like a report without any criteria set. By sending the graphs and the sources of the queries, our report writers found that a test report was running against our production environment.
May 13, 2016
SQL Sentry Review: "I highly recommend Performance Advisor if you manage MSSQL"
Database Administrator / Email Marketing Developer
FragranceNet.comConsumer Goods, 51-200 employees
We use Performance Advisor to monitor our database servers. We use this tool within the IT department to pinpoint pressure points, search for expensive queries, and for capacity planning of our databases. From a business perspective, this tool helps us to address performance problems introduced by new code and plan for new infrastructure.
- Easy to setup in a Microsoft shop that depends on Active Directory
- Alerting cover a range of issues
- Detailed trace information can be retrieved and stored on demand
- Records blocking and deadlock events
- Records disk contention over time
- Records disk utilization over time
- The disk utilization overview does not seem to accurately display volumes created using a software RAID
- It is difficult to determine what isolation level was used for a query.
- The deadlock and blocking queries tab does not record transaction isolation level either. This would help since knowing the transaction isolation level for a query would help us choose a more appropriate isolation level for the blocking transactions.
Performance Advisor is specifically designed for MSSQL database servers located within a Microsoft domain. I can not vouch for the product in monitoring Oracle databases or environments where a non-Microsoft domain is used, or no domain is used at all.
We have a problem with our version of SQL Server where parameters declared as unicode (nvarchar) that are used to compare against columns that are of type Latin1 will have the database engine choose to cast the entire column to unicode instead of downgrading the parameter to a Latin1 type column. When we noticed a lot of simple single record queries using a lot of cpu and performing table scans, we were able to determine which queries needed to be rewritten.
April 29, 2016
Review: "SQL Sentry solves real world multi application hosting challenges"
Technology Director
One North InteractiveInformation Technology and Services, 51-200 employees
Our company provides web site hosting. We use SQL Sentry Performance Advisor to monitor the production SQL Server instances supporting our hosting environment. Our hosting SQL Servers support between 10-40 different application databases. The primary driver for the workload on our application databases is the amount of traffic our hosted web sites receive. At any given time the traffic can be spiking on a specific hosted web site which will cause its corresponding database to spike and cause issues for the entire SQL Server.
- Monitor many internal SQL Server metrics that can help provide early warning about potential issues.
- Graphing of all metrics over configurable time frames with a comparable baseline for the same time frame. The baseline feature is really helpful for understanding how metrics have changed against what is "normal". The baseline is configurable so you can use yesterday, or the same day last week, or a statistically generated baseline. The workload on our application databases varies greatly between business hours and non-business hours so the baseline feature comparing to same day of the week from the previous week is helpful.
- Top consuming queries - SQL Sentry captures the top consuming queries. This helps to identify which database and which function within a database is consuming the most CPU or Disk i/o.
- Query Plans - when SQL Sentry captures a top consuming query - it captures its associated Query Plan. This is very helpful for figuring out why a query is consuming so many resources.
- SQL Sentry is a stand alone solution. There is no direct correlation between SQL Sentry events and application exception events or web server events. All correlation has to be done manually. This isn't really a problem directly with SQL Sentry - but is more the nature of using a stand alone solution like SQL Sentry.
- Using SQL Sentry for reporting can be slow. SQL Sentry is gathering a lot of data. All of that data is written into a SQL database. Reporting pulls from the same SQL Database. If pulling data for a long time range the resulting report can take a long time to load.
- Data Aggregation over time - When you run a report on a specific time range you have very detailed data available. When you run a report over a longer time range the data is aggregated together and specific anomalies get watered down. For example if you run a report over a 10 minute period you will see data at ~1 sec granularity. This makes it really clear where there was a spike in activity. If you run a report over a 24 hour period you will only see general trends. The data is at about 5 min granularity. So there may be a time period where you see a slight rise. You have to zoom in on that specific time frame to see more granular data. As a pro - SQL Sentry makes the process of zooming in and out on different time ranges very easy.
SQL Sentry is a cost effective tool for monitoring mission critical database servers where you don't have a team of deeply experienced DBAs. It effectively allows you to buy DBA trouble shooting skills. You still need to have engineers with a good understanding of SQL Server - but SQL Sentry provides them with the tools to be able to trouble shoot SQL Performance problems.
We had an application database that would occasionally spike to 100% CPU. SQL Sentry helped us identify which database was consuming the CPU. That was pretty straightfoward. What was not straightforward was figuring out why the database was consuming 100% CPU. Every indicator we could see on the surface was that the workload had remained consistent. The volume of requests and type of requests going to the web application were consistent. The volume of SQL transactions was consistent. Where SQL Sentry provided it's worth was in Top Queries. It showed us that one specific query was consuming all of the CPU. When we looked at the execution plan that was captured by SQL Sentry we could see that a sub-optimal plan had been cached. We were then able to flush the cached plan and a new more optimal plan was cached. This returned the database CPU consumption to normal. We then worked through updating the SPROC so that a sub-optimal plan would not be cached. SQL Sentry Top Queries and execution plan capture were critical to handling this incident.
April 27, 2016
Review: "SQL Sentry, the first line of defence for your server"
Senior Data Architect
KFC UK & IrelandFood & Beverages, 10,001+ employees
SQL Sentry was purchased to monitor our new Business Intelligence Infrastructure. The tool allows us to see at a glance if we have any performance issues; we also utilise the alerting feature heavily to make sure that even when we are not in the office or connected we can still see how the server is performing.
- Alerting features are a must, it takes a little while to tune them to your system but once you have them, they will save you and your team countless hours of recovery / server maintenance as you can stop the issue before it even becomes one.
- Performance Manager is great to understand not only how your server is performing now but also any time in the past. We utilise this to drill into any unusual activity with ease due to the UI being so intuitive and self explanatory. Again a massive time saver
- The cloud based reporting is very useful for a quick health check when you are not near your laptop.
- The event manager can really cluttered when using it on a business intelligence server with jobs running throughout the day. It would be great to see this in a different visualisation that could really help you spot the key hot spots, possibly create an impact metric that displays the jobs size depending on how much resource the job took to complete.
SQL Sentry hits the spot when using it for a business intelligence server.
We had a long running query that locked a lot of the schema out of hours, with SQL Sentry not only could I identify what was blocking everything else but also view the specific part of the code and it's execution plan, look at what else was running at the time and then tune the SQL as well as reschedule some activity.
April 26, 2016
SQL Sentry Review: "SQLSentry Performance Advisor helped me manage my SQL Server environment"
Manager of Database Administration
UnitedLex CorporationLegal Services, 1001-5000 employees
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor has been used as a primary monitoring tool for our production environment, it has helped us a lot with troubleshooting bottlenecks, finding performance problems, resolving blocking etc. We're using this tool across the whole organization and monitoring around fifteen large production SQL Servers.
- I can see global view of all my monitored servers on single screen with CPU, Memory, Disk & network usages based on last sample or even historical for upto 3 days. Also if there is an area of concerns Performance Advisor will highlighted that server with red or orange depending upon the condition or level of concerns.
- Blocking and deadlock situations are clearly visible which gives insight to resolve conflicts.
- Disk Activity section provides clear visibility of each and every data files (.MDF, .LDF & .NDF) with the level of activity (Read & Write operations) which is very helpful for us for our OLTP environment to monitor and keep a watch on response from storage system.
- Alert system is good.
- I believe SQL Sentry has good alert mechanism but still I see a room for improvement, for example recently we tried to change subject line of specific type of alerts (for example server offline, or high CPU utilization etc.) to make it more meaningful for our organization and we had hard time doing this.
- Reports need some improvement, reports are good but I believe few summary report need to be added which reflects overall performance of the environment. For example downtime report is available which serves the purpose of availability but having similar reports to reflect high level performance reporting would be helpful.
- In the global view under the disk section ms/IO shows the values based on the sample and changes the color from depending upon threshold which is a good feature. Also, upon right click it allows to generate quick report which again shows time & value for ms/IO. So, it would be a great feature if SQL Sentry can add a functionality to show which particular LUN(s) is responding slowly.
I believe it is a great monitoring tool for highly transaction environments.
We had performance issue with one of the drive which was housing files for tempDB of one of our critical SQL Server and we always had performance issues with that server. After the implementation of SQL Sentry Performance Advisor, we were able to identify that problematic disk and resolve that issue. This is one of the best example I would like to share here.
August 05, 2016
Review: "SQL Sentry provides Insight to SQL Server"
Applications and BI Specialist
KathmanduRetail, 1001-5000 employees
We use SQL Sentry to monitor our production database servers. We use it mainly for performance tuning for our environments. We also use it to analyse expensive queries, blockages, deadlock and so on. Then from the analysis, we apply optimizations accordingly.
- It captures all relevant information about captured queries, from physical metrics to row counts. It packs all the information we need to analyse our database performance.
- It provides a great graphic user's interface to have quick understanding of what is going in the environment, and gives facility to check historical values for the metric in question.
- It could be improved on the way how the SQL Sentry database is managed, for example archiving old data, and also could have SQL agent jobs to do regular maintenance jobs to make it perform better.
- Also it might be an good idea to have a web interface.
- It would be good to be able to configure what kinds of queries to capture in each server instance.
I think SQL Sentry is typically useful for us to understand an environment with performance issues. With this product onboard, we are able to continuously improve our system to give our users the best experience.
We had a lot of situations where SQL Sentry came to rescue us. One of these situations was when we had a query running slow some times, and the majority of the it worked fast. SQL Sentry caught the execution statement and execution plan for us. After analysing the execution plan and parameter values, we found that the cached plan was not optimsed for a certain parameter values set. With this info, we deployed a plan guide to recompile this query, and then now it runs fast all the time.
August 01, 2016
User Review: "SQL Sentry Business Use Case"
Production Support DBA
Cardlytics, Inc.Marketing and Advertising, 201-500 employees
We use SQL Sentry Performance Advisor for real time monitoring of our production systems. It has been extremely useful at providing an at-a-glance summary of current and historical activity. Additionally, the report feature has been invaluable to us for monitoring metrics over time. Performance Advisor has been instrumental in identifying non-SQL related waits that are impacting SQL performance.
- Dashboard tick
- Reports
- Blocking and Deadlocks
- Make interface less complex
- Use simple terminology for menu items
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is well suited for evaluating waits and helps our organization make decisions on scheduling and helps with tuning poorly performing jobs and queries.
Performance Advisor's blocking SQL feature allowed us to track down an issue with a queue service that was causing problems. This saved an entire team several hours worth of manual ground work to determine the issue.
February 17, 2016
Review: "In the Daily SQL war zone with a trusted partner: SQL Sentry"
Senior Database Developer
EnableCompHospital & Health Care, 51-200 employees
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is being used to identify and optimize user created stored procedures, views and functions that perform inefficiently so they can be optimized to run at peak efficiency. It is used to alert the IT and operations staff of events that are causing the SQL server instance to become unstable and go offline or restart.
- Monitors long running queries and alerts on them.
- Provides context for the poorly performing query such as the user running the query, start and end times, number of reads and writes the query or queries has performed.
- Reporting on SQL server top poorly performing queries and provides context to be able to determine why the queries are having such poor performance.
- Provide an interface to perform ad-hoc queries of the data in the SQL Sentry database or a way to export the data for more detailed analysis.
- More detail in the online and local help. More examples that address 'real world' issues.
Monitoring real time Windows server health metrics and SQL server metrics presented in a graphical interface that makes issues imminently apparent is where SQL Sentry Performance advisor excels. It allows a very quick response to current server conditions (both Windows and SQL server) when issues occur. Disk space analysis is less helpful, especially with virtual servers.
Many rows from tables used to import data where being inserted, updated or deleted causing the indexes and statistics on the tables to go out of date more quickly than was realized. I already had a stored procedure that identified and rebuilt or reorganized indexes and recomputed statistics in a batch mode, but on the fly I was able to determine the issue, modify the existing stored procedure to run in a 'real time' fashion on specific tables and was able to almost immediately address the issue and had created another tool in my arsenal to keep the SQL instances I was responsible for running at peak efficiency.
February 15, 2016
SQL Sentry Review: "My only choice for SQL Server performance analysis"
Founder and Chief Architect
Heraflux TechnologiesInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees
I use SQL Sentry Performance Advisor at as many of my clients as possible because it's the most actionable SQL Server monitoring tool on the planet. I have it monitoring all sorts of client databases and infrastructures.It's power comes in how I can quickly see an overview of a server and determine the right direction to go when performance troubleshooting.
- Actionable - Lots of other utilities provide 'pretty' dashboards that do not provide much meaning. PA gives you a dashboard that presents vital performance statistics, and anything unusual jump out at you and help you refine how you approach that server.
- Reporting - The built-in reporting provide much better depth in performance trending than others.
- Performance reviews - The dashboard provides all of the necessary items needed to properly and efficiently review a system for any new issues.
- Virtualization metric overlay - The utility now provides a great overview of the virtualization host-level performance metrics and how it impacts the VM's performance.
- The UI is not the most intuitive at first and presents a learning curve to overcome, but once you know the interface these challenges go away.
- The server running PA can get very busy when monitoring large quantities of servers (100+) but this is a matter of architecture with the deployment of the tool.
I encourage the use of PA for any SQL Server at my clients that I consider of any importance to the business at all. This is the only performance monitoring tool that I recommend for SQL Server. Period. This utility is second to none in terms of the actionable nature of the product, and it's one that DBAs all over can leverage to improve the performance of their servers.
We had a report of extremely slow SQL Server performance on a production server. The infrastructure and development teams were blaming the database layer and would not listen until we came up with a report. The quick dashboard and reporting showed us that the disk latency was extremely high, especially compared with the historical trends. We actually came up with a date and time when the latency started (Friday night at 11:45pm) and took this information to the infrastructure team. Turns out that they had a disk fail and a RAID array was rebuilding a hot-spare drive and they never received the alert because of a misconfigured SMTP server in the SAN.
February 12, 2016
SQL Sentry Review: "It's not Just a Good Choice. It's the Only Complete SQL Performance Analysis Tool Out There"
Team Lead: Database Administration
SurveyMonkeyHealth, Wellness and Fitness, 10,001+ employees
We are currently in the evaluation stage of purchasing SQL Sentry Performance Advisor but in my previous role and as a Technology Consultant I've been responsible for installing, configuring, and using SQL Sentry Performance Advisor at multiple companies to the tune of 150+ seats. I'd advocated for years to size up our install base from 15 seats to over 120 at my last company and eventually succeeded in funding with management please over the results.
There, as well as in other companies I consulted for, I used SQL Sentry Performance Advisor to not only identify issues arising on our SQL servers but most importantly to be able to drill into find out the specific commands that are (and were) causing the pain while we all slept at night. There is nothing more important in troubleshooting performance than knowing the specific commands that underlay points in time when performance degrades. The tool is complex in the data available to the end user but simple enough to set up out of the box and the reports it provides to users across all tiers of management has saved many phone calls and stressful conversations.
- Identifying statements causing performance issues: I've never seen any other tool work as good, or provide as much information, as their "Top SQL" tab in SQL Sentry Performance Advisor and I'm quite familiar with all the major players in the SQL Server tools space. You're able to drill into the statements in each of these commands and display (graphically or tabular) what the associated execution plan looked at as well as the IO/Memory/CPU cost for those statements.
- The Dashboard view give you all you need to see in one shot at the SQL Server instance level: CPU, Memory, IO, Network load... it's all there. Then there is the Default Site overview of all alerts, exceeded thresholds, and current status of these same data points for all monitored instances you can see with a single glance.
- Integration with their one-of-a-kind Plan Explorer product: Plan Explorer blows away anything else out there - and there is not much outside of the Microsoft-supplied tools - for graphical query plan analysis.
- There is a great deal of metadata collected and provided to the end user client tool. I've seen issues with responsiveness inside a VPN as a result. This may be an issue with the VPNs itself but I've seen this with at least 50% of the VPNs I've used their tools through.
- Unless you have a DBA on staff, configuration may be a bit difficult as there are a large number of settings to dial in. That being said I've never heard of anyone not getting assistance quickly in regards to customer support and I know from experience for certain sized installs and larger they'll even come on site for training and configuration assistance (either in person or remote.)
Let's get this straight: when it comes to performance analysis tools for SQL Server this is the only product I'd recommend. I've yet to see an scenario where SQL Sentry Performance Advisor was not appropriate. I've monitored physical and virtual servers, large and tiny instance. No issues across the board.
We had a situation with an internal development team that was laying blame on a performance issue with configuration of the SQL Server instance and were asking for an additional allocation of 64GB of RAM and 8 vCPUs to the VM. We were able to show in less than 5 minutes that the issue with performance instead lay with their internally-developed code running against a sub-standard third-party tool's database. We then were able to tune the query and take CPU consumption from 90%+ down to 40% at the peak.
May 23, 2016
SQL Sentry: "TSAP (modest user) Review"
Owner
TSAP ConsultingInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees
We use it with certain clients who are not technically experienced with deep understanding of issues that may impact SQL performance - specifically when it comes to the performance monitoring of software we have installed with them. Usually it helps us identify where bottlenecks are impacting performance so that the client may reconfigure issues in their network/resource allocation.
- Easy to interpret interface.
- Allows for performance bottlenecks to be quickly identified.
- Low footprint.
- Brings important parameters and variables together on one screen which is helpful.
- To get SQL Sentry to work properly one needs a reasonable understanding of Microsoft tokens and counters. Including something to hand hold and guide inexperienced users for a typical set up would be good.
- A more accessible guide to tokens and counters and what they mean (smart help manual) - would be useful.
Well suited to bottleneck identification - could be a little more helpful for network related problems.
Would it be possible to provide some way to point at remote servers with appropriate corporate hand shaking? We install our software with several clients, and it would be good if we could get through an approval process to point at their environment for intermittent ad-hoc problem solving issues. Continuous monitoring would not be needed, but monitoring whilst doing some observed tests - e.g. running specific sprocs on a specific dataset [would be good].
Would it be possible to provide some way to point at remote servers with appropriate corporate hand shaking? We install our software with several clients, and it would be good if we could get through an approval process to point at their environment for intermittent ad-hoc problem solving issues. Continuous monitoring would not be needed, but monitoring whilst doing some observed tests - e.g. running specific sprocs on a specific dataset [would be good].
SQL Sentry was able to exclude performance related issues as being related to SQL sprocs and or DB design. This then helped us look elsewhere and we soon identified the issue to be related to disk performance. The value of the problem exclusion capabilities for potential SQL bottlenecks should not be underestimated.
May 20, 2016
"SQL Sentry Review"
SQL Server DBA and Developer
Oblate MissionsNon-Profit Organization Management, 51-200 employees
It is being used across the whole organization. It is being used to troubleshoot performance issues and to determine current pressure points. By knowing the pressure points, resources can be allocated appropriately.
- The performance dashboard presentation gives a quick overview of the health of the SQL Instance.
- Sentry products also include the Server OS performance metrics.
- The problematic SQL code 'jumps' out when zooming in on a dashboard.
- It seems to show only 3 weeks of data. Perhaps I'm not quite familiar YET with all the features.
- Having it as an APP on the iPhone would be nice.
It tells you immediately where the pressure points are.
High CPU waits led to the SQL statement that was problematic. Opening up the SQL statement in plan explorer showed signs of outdated statistics. A SQL script was developed to scan for tables/indexes that needed statists updates. After performing the statistics update, performance improved dramatically.
May 20, 2016
User Review: "DBA LifeSaver - SQL Sentry"
Systems Engineer
Agora Inc.Publishing, 501-1000 employees
Our DBA team uses SQL Sentry to monitor and troubleshoot all of our production SQL Server instances. This includes alerting on long running queries, when performance thresholds are met and exceeded, and the monitoring of SQL Agent Jobs.
- Monitoring.
- Troubleshooting.
- Alerting.
- Windows Monitoring.
- Allowing non-power users to utilize the tool for query analysis, without having the ability to kill queries.
- Alerting configuration.
Disk space alerting. We are forced to leverage SCOM, which is clunky at best. If SQL Sentry could provide us with those types of alerting and monitoring it would satisfy all of our SQL Server needs.
One of our order taking systems relies on convoluted foreign key relationships developed by an outside contractor. SQL Sentry has allowed us to pinpoint when these relationships cause deadlocking during and after deployments, and provide that information to the software development team for review and analysis.
May 10, 2016
Review: "SQL Sentry Performance Advisor, Just Great when you have some issues with your SQL Server."
Servers and Infrastructure
Sandvik IT ServicesMachinery, 10,001+ employees
The product really helps us with finding bottlenecks in our SQL servers fast! You get a great overview of the systems performance. I really recommend this product to anyone that has issues with knowing what their SQL server is doing.
- Great overview of the performance part
- Great for searching when deadlocks have occurred
I think for our environment it is perfect!
We had issues with our warehouse management system before we got SQL Sentry. After we installed the product it was just [a matter of waiting] for that issue to occur again. It was really easy to find the cause of the slowness in the system with SQL Sentry.
SQL Sentry Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
Performance dashboard (72)
9.1
Intelligent alerting (70)
9.5
Top SQL (72)
9.9
Historical trend data (70)
8.3
Virtualization support (42)
8.2
About SQL Sentry
SQL Sentry is designed to simplify performance tuning by visualizing where problems exist for faster resolution. This solution aims to help users streamline their defragmentation process and query tuning all in one place.
The vendor says they have combined all SQL Sentry tools into a single unified solution to help users monitor and optimize the Microsoft data platform.
According to the vendor, this solution includes everything for: SQL Server and Windows Performance Monitoring, Event Management, Index Defragmentation and Query Plan Analysis, with Desktop, Web, and Mobile UIs.
SQL Sentry Features
SQL Performance Monitoring Features
Has featurePerformance dashboard
Has featureIntelligent alerting
Has featureTop SQL
Has featureHistorical trend data
Has featureVirtualization support
Additional Features
Has featureQuery Plan Analysis
Has featureBlock and Deadlock Analysis
Has featureEvent Calendars
SQL Sentry Screenshots
SQL Sentry Integrations
SQL Sentry Competitors
Pricing
Has featureFree Trial Available?Yes
Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
Has featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?Yes
Entry-level set up fee?No
| Edition | Pricing Details | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Sentry for SQL Server License | $2,495 | per instance |
| SQL Sentry for SQL Server Subscription | $150 | per month |
SQL Sentry Customer Size Distribution
| Consumers | 5% | |
| Small Businesses (1-50 employees) | 20% | |
| Mid-Size Companies (51-500 employees) | 50% | |
| Enterprises (> 500 employees) | 25% |
SQL Sentry Support Options
| Free Version | Paid Version | |
|---|---|---|
| Phone | ||
| Live Chat | ||
| Forum/Community | ||
| FAQ/Knowledgebase | ||
| Social Media | ||
| Video Tutorials / Webinar |
SQL Sentry Technical Details
| Deployment Types: | On-premise, SaaS |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems: | Windows |
| Mobile Application: | No |
| Supported Countries: | United States, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Poland, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Russia, Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Denmark, Finland |
| Supported Languages: | English |