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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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Learn from top reviewers

While expensive SQL Sentry is the most complete proactive monitoring and reactive troubleshooting tool I've used for SQL Server

Rating: 10 out of 10
July 27, 2021
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 tro...
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Andrew Gould
Manager - Information Technology
Manager of Data Services
Integrated DNA Technologies

Sentry One a comprehensive monitoring tool

Rating: 8 out of 10
April 22, 2021
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Sentry one is used to profile anomalies in the SQL Server like blockings, deadlocks and high CPU usage.
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Prashant BHolane
Engineer - Information Technology
Software Engineer
Prime TSR
SolarWinds SQL Sentry1 year of experience

Why Switch to SQL Sentry?

Rating: 10 out of 10
April 21, 2021
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 alert...
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Mark Lessard
Director - Information Technology
Associate Director of Database Architecture
Merkleinc
SolarWinds SQL Sentry1 year of experience

SQL Sentry - Best of Breed

Rating: 9 out of 10
May 1, 2020
Vetted ReviewVerified 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. W...
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Derek Knutsen
Administrator - Information Technology
Database Administrator
American Health Network
SolarWinds SQL Sentry1 year of experience

SentryOne Product Review

Rating: 10 out of 10
April 28, 2020
Vetted ReviewVerified 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 determ...
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Kevin R. Zakoski
Team Lead - Information Technology
Database Engineer III
LTCG
SolarWinds SQL Sentry5 years of experience
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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 Competitors

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows
Mobile ApplicationNo

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Downloadables

Frequently Asked Questions

Quest are common alternatives for SolarWinds SQL Sentry.

Reviewers rate Performance dashboard highest, with a score of 9.1.

The most common users of SolarWinds SQL Sentry are Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(162)

Reviews

(1-5 of 102)

While expensive SQL Sentry is the most complete proactive monitoring and reactive troubleshooting tool I've used for SQL Server

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
July 27, 2021
AG
Andrew Gould
Manager of Data Services
Integrated DNA Technologies (Biotechnology, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
View profile
Pros
  • 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.
Cons
  • 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.

Why Switch to SQL Sentry?

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
April 21, 2021
ML
Mark Lessard
Associate Director of Database Architecture
Merkleinc (Marketing and Advertising, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
1 year of experience
View profile
Pros
  • 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.
Cons
  • 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.

SQL Sentry - Best of Breed

Rating: 9 out of 10
May 01, 2020
DK
Derek Knutsen
Database Administrator
American Health Network (Hospital & Health Care, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
1 year of experience
View profile
Pros
  • 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.
Cons
  • 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.

SentryOne Product Review

Rating: 10 out of 10
April 28, 2020
Pros
  • 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.
Cons
  • 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.
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