Overview
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…
[SolarWinds SQL Sentry] in a Nutshell
SolarWinds SQL Sentry to monitor, identify the blocker, and fix the problem in no time
SQL Sentry is a must if you have Microsoft SQL databases
SentryOne review
Great performance tool for the experienced DBA
While expensive SQL Sentry is the most complete proactive monitoring and reactive troubleshooting tool I've used for SQL Server
Sentry One a comprehensive monitoring tool
The closest thing to time travel you will experience in SQL Server
SQL Sentry makes my job easier
Why Switch to SQL Sentry?
SQL Sentry to keep an eye on things
Great Performance Monitoring Tool
Already impressed with SQL Sentry
SQL Sentry Review
Awards
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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
SQL Sentry for Azure SQL Database
$161
SQL Sentry
1,450
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
SQL Sentry - Live Demo
Features
SQL Performance Monitoring
SQL Performance Monitoring software is designed to monitor the database at all times
- 9.2Performance dashboard(102) Ratings
Dashboard displays consolidated data with drill-down capability
- 7.9Intelligent alerting(96) Ratings
Customizable alerts and reports indicating outlier values from baseline
- 8.6Top SQL(102) Ratings
Details about any long-running or high impact statements
- 8.6Historical trend data(100) Ratings
Historical trends and anomalies for SQL tuning
- 8.7Virtualization support(64) Ratings
Root cause analysis for virtual platforms like VMWare or Hyper-V
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
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
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(162)Attribute Ratings
- 8.8Likelihood to Renew16 ratings
- 7.1Availability2 ratings
- 7.1Performance2 ratings
- 9Usability12 ratings
- 7.5Support Rating14 ratings
- 8In-Person Training1 rating
- 8.8Implementation Rating8 ratings
- 7.9Configurability2 ratings
- 7Product Scalability1 rating
- 5Ease of integration1 rating
- 8.5Vendor pre-sale2 ratings
- 8.5Vendor post-sale2 ratings
Reviews
(26-50 of 102)Pandemonium Control
- A centralized location to troubleshoot database server issues.
- Quick access to pin in time snapshots database performance.
- Capabilities to drill into problem areas.
- Provide a query interface embedded into the application, so there is no need to bounce back between SSMS and SQL Sentry.
Lives up to the hype
- SQL job management.
- SQL server monitoring.
- Alerting.
- Windows task management.
- Object hierarchy.
SentryOne Product Review
- 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.
- 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.
Essential for any production server
- Excellent presentation of KPIs
- Allows you to deep dive on counters with a click of a button
- Lets you easily move from one time frame to another
- To allow users to configure raw data retention before it is aggregated
- Reporting
- To use algorithms that alert when a relevant or critical KPI is behaving abnormally
- 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.
SQL Sentry Review
- The reporting features and amounts of diversified emails are astonishing.
- The program is able to drill down on granular issues that plague DB's.
- The software does have some issues with false positives.
- The alerting for build updates could be more detailed.
Sentry One: Performance monitoring with much bang for the buck
- It gives real-time updates to performance issues.
- It monitors batch jobs and lets you know when a job completion time falls out of the minimum/maximum range for that job.
- Helps you identify the culprit when blocking or a deadlock is detected.
- It is not easy to figure out disk activity problems when red marching ants point to a particular database.
- It is not easy to analyze and re-assign licenses for SQL Monitoring vs. Windows Performance monitoring. It should be more intuitive and easier to transfer a license from a SQL Server or Windows machine that I know longer want to monitor.
- It is not always easy to drill into the Health Score details and find the pertinent server, database, SQL object, etc.
Complete monitoring of SQL server
- Monitors running processes and reports when they exceed runtimes well beyond those that are considered normal.
- Tracks resource utilization on the SQL Servers and makes recommendations on reconfigurations that would improve performance.
- Tracks troublesome and long-running SQL queries and provides insights into improvements that could be made.
- The user interface is intimidating, and not very friendly. You really have to study and work with the product in order to find what you're looking for.
- The product is SO feature-rich that it is hard to get started simply.
- The warning messages for various server conditions are great, but the "as shipped" values don't work very well with our environment, so there's a tremendous amount of setup necessary.
It's not Just a Good Choice. It's the Only Complete SQL Performance Analysis Tool Out There
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.)
SentryOne worked for us!
- Historical Performance
- VERY Customizable
- Solid, Intuitive Interface
- Excellent Customer Service and Prompt Assistance
- Sometimes the UI can be cluttered. (Although SQL Sentry has worked with us to fix this)
The only downfall I could think of is how it aggregates historical data, and you cannot get as granular with older data. However, I completely understand the need for this, and it may even be something that can be done, we just haven't asked them about it yet.
- Determine the root cause in seconds. Determining the root cause of SQL Server issues can be a time suck in a black hole. This tool eliminates that.
- Historical Perspective. SQL Sentry provides an easy way to review performance intuitively over time.
- Indexes. The Query Plan Explorer almost makes tuning indexes fun.
- UI Response Time. At times the UI is sluggish. This somewhat understandable when you realize what the tool is doing. The 2-3 UI response is not an issue though when compared with the amount of time that it saves you troubleshooting.
Why I love SQL Sentry
- Troubleshooting performance issues and bottlenecks.
- Historical review of spikes and root causes.
- Visualizations.
- Better reports.
- Customizing the dashboard.
- Storing more historical data.
SQL Sentry - Best of Breed
- Provides a real-time view of performance.
- Provides comparison to historical performance baselines.
- Has valuable reports for the executive summary.
- Difficult to limit email alerting to only actionable events.
- Drill down in the event calendar is difficult and can be confusing.
SQL Sentry
- Easy to see everything on one screen
- Awesome customer service
- Alerting is confusing at first, but they are willing to help.
SQL Sentry ROI immediately seen
- Identify problem queries.
- Identify root causes for bottlenecks.
- Provide baseline and historical data for comparison.
- Identifying index related issues.
Good Tool with Exceptional Service!
- Query Logging, for evaluating performance.
- Network logging, for detecting network issues.
- Query plan view is VERY nice. Better than MS-SQL's native query plan visualization.
- Object browser isn't the most intuitive. the "All Targets" heading is fine, but its a little weird to have your servers underneath "Default Site". Perhaps there's functionality I'm missing, but I still think the default setting should be more clear. Perhaps rename it to "Servers".
SQL Sentry Review
- 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.
SQL Sentry Review
- 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.
SentryOne is an Awesome Product
- 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
SQL Sentry is a Great Product
- 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.
SentryOne Brief Review
- 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 the best performance monitoring tool on the market!!!
- 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.
Best tool to monitor SQL Server
- 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
SQL Sentry Business Use Case
- Dashboard tick
- Reports
- Blocking and Deadlocks
- Make interface less complex
- Use simple terminology for menu items
TSAP (modest user) Review
- 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.
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].