Sentry One - the good and the bad
To alert us of any issues with our SQL Server estate and to identify bottlenecks such as slow running queries so we can tune them for …
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What is SolarWinds SQL Sentry?
SolarWinds SQL Sentry is designed to help data professionals optimize SQL Server database performance in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. SQL Sentry delivers metrics to help users find and fix database performance problems and provides scalability, boasting demonstrated success monitoring 800+ SQL Server…
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Popular Features
- Performance dashboard (102)9.292%
- Top SQL (102)8.686%
- Historical trend data (100)8.686%
- Intelligent alerting (96)7.979%
Pricing
Plan Explorer (SQL Server Query Tuning)
$0
On Premise
Free
SQL Sentry for Azure SQL Database
$161
On Premise
Per year per database (annual subscription)
SQL Sentry
1,450
On Premise
Per year per instance (annual subscription)
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- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.sqlsentry.com/portal/store
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- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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What is SolarWinds SQL Sentry?
SolarWinds SQL Sentry is designed to help data professionals optimize SQL Server database performance in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. SQL Sentry delivers metrics to help users find and fix database performance problems and provides scalability, boasting demonstrated success monitoring 800+ SQL Server instances with one monitoring database.
With SQL Sentry, the user can monitor:
- SQL Server
- Azure SQL Database
- SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
- SQL Server on Hyper-V or VMware VMs (including host)
- SQL Server on Azure SQL Database Managed Instance
- SQL Server on Amazon RDS
- SQL Server on Amazon EC2
- SQL Server on Linux
Although a SQL Sentry license can be used to monitor Azure SQL Database in a hybrid environment, dedicated licensing is available for large Azure SQL Database environments.
SolarWinds SQL Sentry Features
SQL Performance Monitoring Features
- Supported: Performance dashboard
- Supported: Intelligent alerting
- Supported: Top SQL
- Supported: Historical trend data
- Supported: Virtualization support
Additional Features
- Supported: Query plan analysis
- Supported: Blocking and deadlock analysis
- Supported: Event Calendar
- Supported: Advisory Conditions
- Supported: AlwaysOn Availability Groups monitoring
- Supported: Index analysis
- Supported: Storage Forecasting
- Supported: SQL Sentry Portal (installed SQL Sentry web interface)
- Supported: Environment Health Overview
- Supported: Tempdb analysis
- Supported: SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) monitoring
SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots
SolarWinds SQL Sentry Integrations
SolarWinds SQL Sentry Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows |
| Mobile Application | No |
SolarWinds SQL Sentry Downloadables
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Reviews
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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.
January 13, 2021
Already impressed with SQL Sentry
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
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 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.
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)
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.
April 29, 2016
First impressions of SQL Sentry Performance Advisor
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is being used for monitoring production and staging SQL Servers. The main tabs used are Top SQL, Blocking, and Deadlocks. Fragmentation Manager is primary used to monitor fragmentation percentage. We do not use it at this time to actually defrag the indexes. Plan Explorer is my primary tool for query plan review and optimization.
- Quickly drill down from Top SQL to query plan and dashboard to evaluate performance and bottlenecks.
- Demonstrated for me that several of the SQL Servers were over allocated in resources. I used it to tune the right amount of cores and memory.
- Alerts, alerts, and more alerts. A level of notification and communication I would not have without the tool.
- It has a lot functionality, the learning curve is pretty large. I would like to see more videos with more detail.
February 25, 2016
SQL Sentry helps me do my job!
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is being used to monitor our important SQL Server Production servers. I use it when I need to find out what is causing an outage of an application and to find out what SQL is possibly causing slower performance. I also use it to find times when the load is greater on resources, for example, on the CPU. I find it to be a very valuable tool in gaining visibility into my servers.
- Graphs showing load on resources in both SQL and Windows.
- Showing detail when a deadlock occurs so that it's obvious what SQL is running that has caused the killing of a victim process.
- Retaining historical data so that an issue can be researched thoroughly.
- Sometimes the graphs are a curve and sometimes they are blocks - I'm not sure why - I'd probably prefer to always see curves.
- When looking at blocking, I would prefer ordering to be of the longest running process descending to the shortest running process.
- I find it a little difficult to understand the results of the Top SQL. I'm not sure how it could be clearer and cleaner but there may be some room for improvement there.
February 19, 2016
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor -- A Must Have Tool!
We use it to troubleshoot client SQL server instances that are experiencing performance issues. The issues are generally related to poor queries and/or lack of index maintenance, but they're problems that clients are unable to track down themselves. Most the majority of them are small businesses that don't have in house IT expertise, especially with SQL server.
- The tool is extremely effective at quickly finding performance bottlenecks
- The ability to find exactly the troublesome queries and perform target traces on demand.
- The workflow of SQL Sentry is easy to use and just lets you get about the business of finding/resolving problems and not have to worry about learning the interface.
- Would love to have some form of multi tenancy even if it means a subset or reduced functionality for those users. The ability to X user access to only information about Y databases in a given instance or instances
February 15, 2016
My only choice for SQL Server performance analysis
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use SQL Sentry Performance Advisor at as many of my clients as possible because it's the most actionable SQL Server monitoring tool on the planet. I have it monitoring all sorts of client databases and infrastructures.It's power comes in how I can quickly see an overview of a server and determine the right direction to go when performance troubleshooting.
- Actionable - Lots of other utilities provide 'pretty' dashboards that do not provide much meaning. PA gives you a dashboard that presents vital performance statistics, and anything unusual jump out at you and help you refine how you approach that server.
- Reporting - The built-in reporting provide much better depth in performance trending than others.
- Performance reviews - The dashboard provides all of the necessary items needed to properly and efficiently review a system for any new issues.
- Virtualization metric overlay - The utility now provides a great overview of the virtualization host-level performance metrics and how it impacts the VM's performance.
- The UI is not the most intuitive at first and presents a learning curve to overcome, but once you know the interface these challenges go away.
- The server running PA can get very busy when monitoring large quantities of servers (100+) but this is a matter of architecture with the deployment of the tool.
February 12, 2016
30 days after installation, the number of false alerts in the environment went to almost 0 from our previous monitoring tool.
At present, it is only being used by the DBA Team. This is due to the size of our environment and the scope of the installation. Once things are cleaned up and running as expected, we will start to allows others into the environment.
- Customizing Notification and alerts is great. You can really narrow down what you want to be woken up for in the middle of the night.
- The polling machines are great for a large environment for ensuring scale out and redundancy
- The application UI is painful to use if there is any latency between it and the database (and sometimes even then). This might be due to the large environment and the number of instances we are waiting, but it does make it using it for troubleshooting challenging at times, especially if you are remote working on a VPN.
- There are some confusing things in the UI. Nodes turn red for specific failures, but not others. Why shouldn't you be able to clear any alert? Why not be able to clear a cluster fail over, with adding a note saying "emergency failure due to incident XXXXXXX", but be able to clear a SQL Agent job alert with the same type of note?
- When inserting new instances, it has to check all domains that are in the list, not just the domain that the machine is being added into. This can be painful when inserting a new machine from a different domain across the pond.