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SolarWinds SQL Sentry

SolarWinds SQL Sentry

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…

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Recent Reviews

SentryOne review

8 out of 10
November 10, 2021
Incentivized
We use it to monitor our critical SQL server cluster and it is currently just used by the DBAs. It allows us to monitor in real time but …
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Already impressed with SQL Sentry

10 out of 10
January 13, 2021
We are using SQL Sentry to centralize our SQL server monitoring from a number of differing domains. For the first time at this …
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SQL Sentry Review

10 out of 10
June 25, 2020
We use SQL Sentry to monitor and alert on our SQL Server Environment. It helps us troubleshoot live issues as they occur using the …
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Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 5 features
  • Performance dashboard (102)
    9.2
    92%
  • Top SQL (102)
    8.6
    86%
  • Historical trend data (100)
    8.6
    86%
  • Intelligent alerting (96)
    7.9
    79%
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Pricing

View all 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)

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.sqlsentry.com/portal/store

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

SQL Sentry - Live Demo

YouTube
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Features

SQL Performance Monitoring

SQL Performance Monitoring software is designed to monitor the database at all times

8.4
Avg 8.3
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Product Details

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

Screenshot of SQL Sentry DeadlocksScreenshot of SQL Sentry Top SQL

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Integrations

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows
Mobile ApplicationNo

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Downloadables

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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(162)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 102)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
April 28, 2020

Pandemonium Control

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
It is well suited for monitoring all servers in one consolidated interface, rather than bouncing around between different registered SQL Servers.
April 28, 2020

Lives up to the hype

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SQL Sentry started out being used by one division/group and has now expanded to another group and working on expanding to additional areas. It is being used to proactively discover database related issues and manage SQL jobs across different database servers.
  • SQL job management.
  • SQL server monitoring.
  • Alerting.
  • Windows task management.
  • Object hierarchy.
I would think for mid-size groups/divisions it works the best. I cannot imagine having more than 10 or so servers on one monitoring service. It is great when you have a lot of inexperienced users hitting the same database servers with ad hoc queries. SQL Sentry is much more powerful than I know I am using it for, it just takes time to figure out what is best for your own use.
Kevin R. Zakoski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
My team uses SentryOne to monitor our production SQL environment. They will use it as a first tool to verify system health when pulled into production issues. If SQL is determined to be the bottleneck in process, we'll use the information SentryOne provides to pinpoint the problem code and pass the information onto developers for fine tuning. In our development environment, our developers also have the client tools to monitor their processes. If we had licenses available for the Dev/Test servers, then we could fine tune them before releasing code to production. This is limited because we only have a few licenses to spare for Dev/Test.
  • 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.
It has great out-of-the-box features that make it easy to install and get it up and running right away. However, fine tuning and customization of the solution, like setting up custom alerts and notifications, needs to be someones dedicated responsibility. Because of this, we don't necessarily have the time allocated to become true subject matter experts on the tool. What we get out of the box is usually going to be the norm.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Performance Advisory allows you to quickly know what the overall performance of the servers looks like. From the dashboard you can deep dive right away to any specific area that may require attention. It contains the KPIS and data of almost all aspects of the SQL 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
I think it is well suited for all scenarios where an SQL Server is involved. Given the costs perhaps I wouldn't spend money paying for licensing on Development environments.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We 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.
December 11, 2019

SQL Sentry Review

Justin Randolph | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SQL Sentry is being utilized to monitor our current SQL environment. The product has provided insight and a new form of analytics to help push maintenance in a positive direction. The department is the only current user for this monitoring software. It helps prevent failure across the whole organization. Some business problems that are addressed is the new form of communication. Having a solid reporting platform has pushed the standard for other monitoring software in our environment.
  • 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.
SQL Sentry is great for shops that are implementing more than one SQL box, but monitoring just one server that isn't traffic-intensive can be very underwhelming for new DBA's.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
SQL Sentry is being used by our IT department to monitor our SQL Servers. It lets us know when there is a performance problem or if there are issues with certain batch jobs.
  • 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.
It is well-suited for analyzing and identifying performance issues. It is also well-suited for monitoring failures for SQL jobs and performance issues resulting from blocking or deadlocks.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the product to identify performance issues as they occur, with the goal of improving our processes and software to eliminate these issues going forward. We also use the product to monitor the health of our servers and to identify developing issues well before they actually make an impact on the environment.
  • 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 great for making sure your environment is performing well. I love the fact that I can monitor my entire SQL Server estate from 1 screen. However, the setup and customization to ensure your inbox doesn't get inundated with warning messages are tedious and time-consuming.
Timothy Ford | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

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.
November 18, 2019

SentryOne worked for us!

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Currently, the DBA team is the primary user of SQL Sentry. We use it for monitoring and performance tuning as well as mining the data for our own internal reporting. We have recently been rolling it out to other teams within Data Services (Data Engineers, Data Warehouse, etc.) and developers as well. The other groups use it for performance tuning and SQL Agent job reporting/history.
  • 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)
As a DBA, SQL Sentry has been extremely suited for most scenarios where I would need a monitoring tool. The primary thing I use it for is alerting. The default alerts are beneficial, and you can make custom alerts for seemingly anything you can think of.

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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use SQL Sentry to manage in-house production and development databases as well as production databases of our clients. SQL Sentry allows us to effectively, efficiently manage many databases in our high volume, highly transactional system. This tool allows us to help us keep our system running smoothly and proactively fend off possible problems, greatly reducing and even eliminating the dreaded "the system seems slow today" phone call.
  • 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.
There are a lot of choices in this area, a few leaders. The entire process from pre-sales, to sales, training and finally using S1 daily has been smooth. The combination of all aspects of the company and product leads to a "you can't go wrong with S1" recommendation.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SQL Sentry is one of my favorite tools. In a single dashboard I can see the state of most metrics I care about for daily operations and well being of the SQL instances. The most useful feature is having the ability to trace back performance issues, days and even weeks after they have occurred. You can establish a baseline and detect unusual activity in real-time.
  • Troubleshooting performance issues and bottlenecks.
  • Historical review of spikes and root causes.
  • Visualizations.
  • Better reports.
  • Customizing the dashboard.
  • Storing more historical data.
It's best for real-time and historical analysis of what is going on in your systems. However, since it's limited to 5000 sessions in some cases it won't fit certain systems.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SQL Sentry is being used to monitor performance and support troubleshooting issues in our SQL Server infrastructure. It provides thorough and more complete information than the native tools. We use it across the main SQL Server Farm by a team of 5 DBAs
  • 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.
This product has value for medium to large SQL Server infrastructures. Smaller instantiations of less than 10 instances will derive value but not as much as those organizations with 10 or more servers to monitor. SQL Sentry's newer product (SQL Sentry Essentials) is the appropriate choice for these cases.
April 26, 2019

SQL Sentry

Michael Abernathy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use SQL Sentry to monitor and alert on production SQL Server systems.
  • Easy to see everything on one screen
  • Awesome customer service
  • Alerting is confusing at first, but they are willing to help.
SQL Sentry is well suited for a SQL Server shop. We also use DB2 and the DB2 guys are very jealous over the SQL Server monitoring tools.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SQL Sentry is used to identify issues with our custom SAAS solution for the education industry. It is used by IT to identify issues in our SQL environment and by the development team to find the root cause of SQL issues and correct and/or improve them.
  • Identify problem queries.
  • Identify root causes for bottlenecks.
  • Provide baseline and historical data for comparison.
  • Identifying index related issues.
I cannot think of any scenario where it would not be useful. It is very helpful in identifying where we can improve our code to improve performance and reliability.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Monitors five servers, many with production issues. The old environment had been very neglected until a DBA was hired. I am the DBA's backup.
  • 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".
Haven't nearly explored all that is possible with SQL Sentry, however it was essential to diagnosing an issue we had recently. A very fast query was running thousands of times, vs. just occasionally as in the prior release. This would have been near impossible to find without SQL Sentry logging this query. Also, the network activity dashboard was the first indication there was a problem, which was our first indication of the issue.
March 15, 2019

SQL Sentry Review

Chris Taylor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
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.
November 23, 2018

SQL Sentry Review

Lars Rasmussen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Dennis Squires | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
November 28, 2017

SentryOne Brief Review

Jun Tang | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Nick Buckley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
It'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.
Charles Hitchcock | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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].
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