Sentry One - the good and the bad
To alert us of any issues with our SQL Server estate and to identify bottlenecks such as slow running queries so we can tune them for …
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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…
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Popular Features
- Performance dashboard (102)9.292%
- Top SQL (102)8.686%
- Historical trend data (100)8.686%
- Intelligent alerting (96)7.979%
Pricing
Plan Explorer (SQL Server Query Tuning)
$0
On Premise
Free
SQL Sentry for Azure SQL Database
$161
On Premise
Per year per database (annual subscription)
SQL Sentry
1,450
On Premise
Per year per instance (annual subscription)
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- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.sqlsentry.com/portal/store
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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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.
SolarWinds SQL Sentry Features
SQL Performance Monitoring Features
- Supported: Performance dashboard
- Supported: Intelligent alerting
- Supported: Top SQL
- Supported: Historical trend data
- Supported: Virtualization support
Additional Features
- Supported: Query plan analysis
- Supported: Blocking and deadlock analysis
- Supported: Event Calendar
- Supported: Advisory Conditions
- Supported: AlwaysOn Availability Groups monitoring
- Supported: Index analysis
- Supported: Storage Forecasting
- Supported: SQL Sentry Portal (installed SQL Sentry web interface)
- Supported: Environment Health Overview
- Supported: Tempdb analysis
- Supported: SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) monitoring
SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots
SolarWinds SQL Sentry Integrations
SolarWinds SQL Sentry Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows |
| Mobile Application | No |
SolarWinds SQL Sentry Downloadables
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Reviews and Ratings
(162)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 102)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
September 29, 2022
Sentry One - the good and the bad
- Alerting of critical issues
- Identify slow running queries
- Emailing when a SQL Server is down
- The client version is tightly bound to the server version so all have to be upgraded at the same time.
- The client is quite slow at times
- The windows metrics is hard to get working
January 19, 2022
[SolarWinds SQL Sentry] in a Nutshell
- Jobs management
- Locking investigation
- Performance analyze
- Monitoring of AlwaysON
- Creating smoother integration to 3rd part tools, such as Slack, PagerDuty, etc.
- Adding the ability to have an option for adding custom metrics defined by user queries
- Adding more dashboards and visibility into the SQL Sentry Portal
January 19, 2022
SolarWinds SQL Sentry to monitor, identify the blocker, and fix the problem in no time
- Query analysis
- More ways to monitor database performance
- Graphical representation of different factors
- Customized dashboards are good, but can be improved further.
- More details can be shown to optimize query plan.
- CPU and memory usage , availability can be shown in more different ways with additional details.
January 18, 2022
SQL Sentry is a must if you have Microsoft SQL databases
- Real-Time Monitoring
- Top Long Running SQL
- Performance troubleshooting
- Job Monitoring/Planning
- Procedure and Query Statistics
- Shiny Easy to use interface for those not comfortable with writing Queries
- Integration with Azure Data Studio
- A Containerized, platform agnostic web client
- Support for Other Operating Systems
- Support for other databases
November 10, 2021
SentryOne review
- Monitors IO at multiple levels such as Storage, OS & Database level.
- Top SQL provides a lot detailed analysis which allows you optimise queries
- Alerting when setup correctly allow you to fix issues before users are aware.
- Temp DB is not monitored and needs to be
- Improved notifications like push
July 28, 2021
Great performance tool for the experienced DBA
- The performance dashboards are very useful and help bring attention directly to the problem areas.
- The alerting system is extremely customizable,, so you don't get peppered with a bunch of useless alerts that make you blind to real action-worthy alerts.
- The reporting is powerful enough to provide exactly what you need to see trends over time.
- The alert customization is powerful, but can be cumbersome to set up.
- There is so much information on the screen at any given time that without some practice it can be overwhelming.
- 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.
- 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.
April 22, 2021
Sentry One a comprehensive monitoring tool
- Problem detection
- Alerts
- Graphs
- High resource usage
- Calendar take time to load
- incomplete execution plan
- 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.
April 21, 2021
SQL Sentry makes my job easier
- Because of previous products, we had been accustomed to receiving emails for our alerts. SentryOne provides this functionality with great features like not using it for everything monitored to preventing our mailbox from being flooded by controlling alerts to a certain amount in a time frame (customizable) and an alert to tell you that limit has been reached.
- SentryOne provides a great blocking page to help understand a blocking chain quickly. It is also configurable to ignore short term blocking that hasn't run long enough to be of concern.
- Top-SQL has been a helpful feature to recognize processes or jobs that run beyond their normal run time. Also, helpful when looking for what was running during times an issue has come up and we need to see what was running in the past.
- There is still some work to do with the baseline data. I am sure there are a great number of alerts that could be created using this data to highlight variations beyond normal.
- All the alerts have the ability to trigger a response, providing some best practice configurations of these might help us to use these features more often.
- Could use better documentation on the ports and firewall settings needed during the process of adding an instance to monitoring. This has proven to be different than what is used once monitoring is setup.
April 21, 2021
Why Switch to SQL Sentry?
- 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.
April 13, 2021
SQL Sentry to keep an eye on things
- offers good insight into data that would otherwise be time-consuming to compile
- performance tuning
- monitoring metrics
- customization of alerts can be tricky
- could have more granular data
- summary reports could be more complete
April 07, 2021
Great Performance Monitoring Tool
- Performance tuning.
- Monitoring.
- History tracking.
- User interface could use some improvement.
- Make it easier to drill down.
- Add ability to set up more alerting.
January 13, 2021
Already impressed with SQL Sentry
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Metrics collection
- Collects data across differing domains
- SQL Plan Explorer is part of the tool
- Alert configuration is amazing
- Customer support is outstanding
- No metrics for replication, but does alert
- Thick client is slow and almost unusable over a VPN
- The alert configuration is so flexible that it has a steep learning curve
June 25, 2020
SQL Sentry Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- The performance dashboard makes it easy to get a quick overview of the current state of the DB server.
- All monitoring tools have overhead. SQL Sentry does a good job of making the data collection as efficient as possible. I have seen performance issues with another 3rd party monitoring tool. I have not seen any with SQL Sentry.
- Highlighting a significant period on the dashboard (like high CPU, large waits etc) and jumping to Top SQL is very handy.
- There is a bit of a learning curve when setting up advisory conditions (ie alerts on specific metrics).
- The Top SQL tab does a great job at big resource hogs. However the small, frequently executed queries are not as easy to analyze with this tool.
May 23, 2020
Sql Sentry, a power tool for DBAs
- PA focuses attention to problem areas when in the moment and helps get us to quicker problem resolution. Trapping execution plans for long running queries has been particularly helpful as has the insight into disk activity.
- Running PA in both QA and production has allowed for more efficient benchmarking of changes due to go to production and resolution of possible performance problems.
- PA does not replace a DBA but it does help them to be more focused and efficient in a number of situations.
- I would like to see the UI be more responsive, particularly when looking at historical records.
- Capture of execution plans is sometimes unpredictable and I would like to see that more often
- Reporting of job runtimes over history is difficult. Pulling baselines and exporting for multiple jobs would be very helpful.
- Dropping anomalous job execution times from stats would be helpful when exceeding maximum runtimes is important
- Identifies executions, CPU usage and waits of stored procs
- Identifies waits, wait states within the monitored database(s)
- Tracks blocked and what is blocking database activity
- Identification of reports and report activity on SSRS servers
- Identification of report jobs and subscriptions
- Identify rights issues on objects
- 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
May 02, 2020
SQL Sentry provides Insight to SQL Server
- 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.
May 01, 2020
Splendid Sentry!
- AlwaysON Availability Pack.
- SQL Plan Explorer- Very good utility
- Easy to use Reports
- BI monitoring capabilities
- Sentry One cloud pack for high availability
- Azure PaaS monitoring
- Capacity Trending and Analysis
- Capture costly SQL Statements
- Alert the Database Administration Staff to deadlocks, blocking and other important issues
- Able to provide management with performance statistics on the database and server
- Some issues monitored to generate a health score I find to be misleading. One example would be % of free space when you have the data files set for autogrowth.
May 01, 2020
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor
- In-depth monitoring
- Vast array of customisation
- support
- Documentation of customization
- Configuration
- explain what is being monitored and default alert values
May 01, 2020
SQL Sentry - Best of Breed
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- 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.
May 01, 2020
Force Multiplier
- Provides a fantastic review capability for historic data, collating data in a far more efficient, presentable way than you can with default tools. You know that if a customer experienced even the slightest performance dip overnight, you can review that to the finest detail later.
- A highly customisable monitoring system, providing rock solid information which you can drill down to the smallest detail.
- An outstanding Support Team, which continues to go above and beyond any expectations.
- The perfect SQL Server monitoring platform.
- Has the potential to make the business think they can replace DBAs with this fantastic product.
- Windows Integrated Authentication for cross-domain monitoring (but you can monitor across domains, so this can be forgiven!).
April 29, 2020
Great Performance Engineering Tool
- I like the way that the graphs on the dashboard can be selected and synchronize to show how each are related.
- The ease at which problematic SQL can be identified by spikes on the dashboard make this tool invaluable to a Performance Engineering team.
- We have a number of installations across different environments and solution lines. The tool needs to be able to switch between them within the tree view instead of needing to connect to a different installation from the file menu
- We receive frequent timeouts when looking at the Top SQL tab on our busiest SQL servers with a lot of history. Something needs to be done on large repositories