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%
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Plan Explorer (SQL Server Query Tuning)
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SQL Sentry for Azure SQL Database
$161
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Per year per database (annual subscription)
SQL Sentry
1,450
On Premise
Per year per instance (annual subscription)
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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 |
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Reviews
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September 29, 2022
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 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
January 18, 2022
SQL Sentry is a must if you have Microsoft SQL databases
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
July 28, 2021
Great performance tool for the experienced DBA
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.
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.
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.
April 21, 2021
SQL Sentry makes my job easier
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.
April 21, 2021
Why Switch to SQL Sentry?
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.
April 07, 2021
Great Performance Monitoring Tool
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.
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.
May 23, 2020
Sql Sentry, a power tool for DBAs
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
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
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.
May 01, 2020
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor
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
May 01, 2020
SQL Sentry - Best of Breed
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.
May 01, 2020
Force Multiplier
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!).
April 29, 2020
Great Performance Engineering Tool
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
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.
April 28, 2020
SentryOne Product Review
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.
April 28, 2020
Essential for any production server
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
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.
November 19, 2019
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.)
May 07, 2019
SQL Sentry - Best of Breed
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.
March 15, 2019
SQL Sentry Review
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.
October 09, 2018
SentryOne is an Awesome Product
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
November 28, 2017
SentryOne Brief Review
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.