SolarWinds SQL Sentry Reviews and Ratings

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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].

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

It tells you immediately where the pressure points are.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used internally by IT to support all corporate SQL server database servers. It reports the performance of our databases to keep everything up and running.

Likelihood to Recommend

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SQL Sentry within the IT department to help monitor and isolate issues associated with all production level database servers. SQL Sentry provides our IT department and DBA with the tools to quickly identify performance issues with our SQL Server databases. SQL Sentry offers us a centralized portal and a snapshot of our database servers health.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for monitoring all servers in one consolidated interface, rather than bouncing around between different registered SQL Servers.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am using it to monitor 5 servers running Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2, soon to be upgrading to a newer version. We have replications and many jobs including SSIS jobs that we need to maximize performance and address failures quickly in a production environment [that is] busy 365 days a year. I find that its primary benefit for me so far is in identifying job failures (notification) and identifying performance problems and giving some information that helps resolve them.

Likelihood to Recommend

SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is well suited to production environments where performance and high reliability are important and the SQL environments see heavy, complicated use, including SSIS jobs, complex views and queries, replication, and other features that require you to get the most out of the hardware and software that you have to get a job done or get more efficient.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SQL Sentry Performance Advisor to find failures in our own software as it is running by the email alerting feature. We find blocks and deadlocks very quickly this way and eliminate the issue before it causes larger problems. We also use the software to identify long running SQL and problems with our stats and indexes.

Likelihood to Recommend

SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is great for quickly finding a long running SQL. It is easy to see and evaluate these queries. Compared to Activity Monitor it is a dream come true. It is also great at identifying and alerting on blocking and deadlocks inside the database. The dashboard is also a great feature.