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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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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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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

(1-25 of 102)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 improved performance.
  • 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
Production SQL Server implementations
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We've purchased SolarWinds SQL Sentry in order to have eyes inside our database servers. From the moment that we rolled it out, people were excited to use it and couldn't believe that such a tool exists [that] can provide so many details on the queries and performance inside the server. It has helped us to discover performance issues, bugs, and much more.
  • 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
[SolarWinds] SQL Sentry is well suited for any production SQL Server that has performance issues or a need to look into the guts of the server itself. Using the very specific features that are targeting SQL Server, you can see that every feature you use was described by the hands of a DBA and it is suited to be used by one. It is not suitable to be used with other database technologies at the moment.

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It helps to monitor SQL server performance monitoring with the help of graphs. ]The software] helps to identify the performance problems like long running quries on the database. [It] helps you to create best index for the given query. Daily running queries on [the] database can be easily viewed and its wait time can also be monitored.
  • 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.
[SolarWinds] SQL Sentry is well suited in [the] following cases: Nodes, availability, monitoring, query optimization, identification of problems, and increasing overall database performance. With the help of dashboards and graphs one can easily check all the important factors in one go. Network performance monitoring can be done easily. Databases can be monitored on AWS with the help of SentryOne.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The dashboard view of our server allows us to monitor the activity on our primary system and at a glance know if there is an issue. Getting to travel back in time and isolate performance issues is a huge bonus for us. We have been able to optimize and reduce issues with our database allowing our users to have a better experience with the dependent software. We also use it to monitor and plan our ETL jobs to not interfere with each other. In our regional community, we recommend others to SQL Sentry to monitor their Microsoft SQL instances.
  • 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
Just had an end-user approach me about a long-running report. I was able to utilize the Top SQL tab and view the long-running report, copy the SQL being executed so I can place it in a notebook for later review for performance optimization. My manager looked in on the DBA Space earlier this morning to inquire about login issues for an application. As we had the dashboard loaded on our primary monitor, we were able to quickly glance and identify that the issue was not with the database. The issue was with a specific web server that was identified with other tools. We received a lot of calls in a short period of time with reports of 504 issues in the application. Using the Top SQL tab, identified that there was a report query being run multiple times that was causing table locks to not release. All these issues were identified in seconds with SentyOne. Most were resolved in under 60 seconds from the initial report of concern.
November 10, 2021

SentryOne review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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 also allows us to better understand why problems had happened so we can prevent them from reoccurring.
  • 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
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization is using SQL Sentry to monitor a group of high-profile SQL Servers for performance problems. The DBA team relies on this tool to quickly resolve performance issues -- sometimes before the users even notice something is wrong. It also helps with long-term capacity planning by giving us historical trends of many useful metrics.
  • 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.
This solution is perfect for a team with a large server count and, at least, moderate experience supporting a SQL Server environment. If the environment is smaller or the team has less experience working with SQL Server performance tuning methodologies, then the tool may be overwhelming for the users.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I manage the department that is responsible for all of the company's databases. We use SolarWinds SQL Sentry for monitoring our SQL servers proactively as well as reactive troubleshooting.
  • 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.
Of all the tools I've used, SolarWinds SQL Sentry's Top Query has been the single most helpful tool in helping me identify which queries are putting a load on our servers and at what times. This greatly simplifies my job in prioritizing tuning. Having Plan Explorer directly linked to the tool is icing on the cake.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Sentry one is used to profile anomalies in the SQL Server like blockings, deadlocks and high CPU usage.
  • Problem detection
  • Alerts
  • Graphs
  • High resource usage
  • Calendar take time to load
  • incomplete execution plan
[Well suited to] Show top running queries and details like CPU usage and start time.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SentryOne to monitor our Production SQL instances for the entire organization. We choose SentryOne as our monitoring solution to reduce dependency on custom written alerts. This eliminates having to maintain custom alert compatibility with different versions of SQL Server and we are confident in the best practice standards SentryOne uses to develop their alerts. SentryOne is my first place to go when problems arise, and SentryOne is usually the first to let me know there is a problem.
  • 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.
SQL Sentry has a very simple to follow layout for configuration and is easily adapted to each instance that has special requirements. Also, having the option to configure an alert to do more than one action is invaluable. Using the Alerting Channel, emails, and running scripts to address the issue automatically provides great value. Being able to set time windows of when to monitor and not monitor, as well as turning off all monitoring as needed by the server or reducing unneeded alerts during maintenance.
Mark Lessard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SQL Sentry in my department to monitor patterns and fluctuations in performance for our SQL Servers. It's helped us address monthly spikes and unusual performance dips, so we know when we have a bug in just-released code and we know when to prepare for slightly-slower systems and address that accordingly.
  • 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
SQL Sentry is a great monitoring tool for performance in environments that are transaction-heavy. It gives a complex overall view of performance on a daily/hourly/etc. basis so you know where spikes are happening (and when, more importantly). It also provides insight into blocking processes, so if you have a long-running query/job, you can see what's happening more clearly.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have used SQL Sentry primarily for helping us monitor and proactively deal with performance issues with SQL Server. When we have a performance problem this tool has been quite helpful at reviewing past history and allow us to see patterns that may be causing us issues and helps us identify areas we can make changes to improve performance.
  • Performance tuning.
  • Monitoring.
  • History tracking.
  • User interface could use some improvement.
  • Make it easier to drill down.
  • Add ability to set up more alerting.
I feel this tool is ideally suited for monitoring performance issues in an OLTP environment maybe not so much for DW applications.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are using SQL Sentry to centralize our SQL server monitoring from a number of differing domains. For the first time at this organization, we are getting a comprehensive view of our entire SQL estate. The previous solution was a mix of individual alerts on various SQL instances and several instances of a competing monitoring tool.
  • 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
SQL Sentry is so flexible it's amazing. It comes with a steep learning curve and will take time to truly implement and dial in, but you're not alone--customer support is outstanding. My biggest complaint is that the thick client is slow and almost unusable over a VPN. Since COVID hit, that's a big deal. The web portal is snappy and fast, and I look forward to when the thick client is retired in favor of the portal.
June 25, 2020

SQL Sentry Review

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use SQL Sentry to monitor and alert on our SQL Server Environment. It helps us troubleshoot live issues as they occur using the dashboard and Top SQL. The history allows us to look back and investigate issues that have already happened. The built in baselines help us compare current metrics with historical norms. The dashboard gives us the a great view to analyze CPU, waits, disk latency and many other metrics on a single screen. There are some good out of the box reports. It is a powerful and flexible tool.
  • 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.
SQL Sentry allows the user to get a quick overview of the DB server and then drill into problem areas to get more details. The dashboard charts make it easy to snip and paste into Teams chats for the group to analyze. It seamlessly integrates with Plan Explorer for detailed analysis of the execution plan.
Kevin Dickover, PMP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SQL Sentry Performance Advisor on both MSSQL Server and Analysis Services. It allows us to go back and investigate performance events that occurred outside of the normal workday and correlate what was happening on a server to other servers that it was connected to at the time. Over time it has allowed us to address specific recurring performance problems that we might not have been able to easily track down.
  • 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
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is good at monitoring your system over time and allowing you to go back to previous problems to compare what was happening then to what is happening now. It is also good at reporting on harder to trap errors occurring in your system, memory pressure events in analysis services spring to mind here.

I've have heard of people trying to replace DBAs with this tool, that is a bad idea. This is a tool for DBAs, not a replacement.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I [use it to] watch for large usages of CPU and repetitive use of stored procedures and ad-hoc queries.
  • 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
Very appropriate tool when applications appear to be dragging when many queries run without any perceptive issue
Adrian Sullivan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
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.
  • 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.
Jian Fu | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
May 01, 2020

Splendid Sentry!

Sharath K | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SQL Sentry addressed one of our pain areas with accomplishing performance insights for critical trading system. It enabled performance insights for DBAs which was difficult to accomplish through native scripts.
Sentryone has added few new capabilities around monitoring SSAS which enhanced to expand our monitoring capabilities. It enabled proactive monitoring on cube failures and utilization.
  • 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
On Contrast to other vendors SQL Sentry stands top. Sentry one is doing good job in terms of connecting with SQL community and imparting the SQL knowledge.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using it to monitor our SQL Server instance with customer data on it. It enables me to review the load on our server and also monitor high cost SQL Statements.
  • 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.
I believe SQL Sentry is well suited for any environment where you need to monitor performance for both the databases and the database server. I wouldn't think it would be neccessary in a development environment.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Monitor production and development instances for benchmarking, baselining and troubleshooting. we shared access with devs, dbas and ops team to give full insight to the sql server performance. gave everyone a single view of issues and way to share issues or concerns across all teams. with enough rbac controls to keep things simple and secure
  • In-depth monitoring
  • Vast array of customisation
  • support
  • Documentation of customization
  • Configuration
  • explain what is being monitored and default alert values
Great for indepth monitoring where you can plug in 3rd party tool and know you are gathering everything needed to troubleshoot issues. If you dont have a datbase administrator, the amount of details gathered may be to large and set you off down the wrong path / give you red herrings for some issues
Derek Knutsen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
May 01, 2020

Force Multiplier

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As a Managed Service provider, SentryOne provides us with a key platform to monitor, diagnose issues and optimize performance for our customers. The platform provides the capability for services to be monitored 24/7 with in-depth, relevant information to be captured and reviewed for proactive and reactive cases, improving service delivery significantly.
  • 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!).
A customer experiences a slow Analysis Services cube processing overnight from their Data Warehouse and wants to understand why this issue has occurred. SentryOne provides you the capability to see exactly what happened, with just as much detail as if you were sitting on the servers at 3:00am monitoring it directly. This applies for SQL Server, Windows, Azure, APS. Once you have experienced the product, you will realize you must have it.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SQL Sentry to help us identify performance issues and remediate them quickly. In addition, we use it to alert on blocking and deadlocks.
  • 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
SQL Sentry is very useful in production and performance testing environments for identifying and fixing slow performing applications. It is difficult on very high volume instances with a lot of history.
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