Item: IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server
Rating: 9
Author: Steven Gockley, MBA, MCSA

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We rely on IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server to monitor all of our production SQL server environment. This includes our standalone instances as well as our always-on-availability groups. IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server has allowed us to automate all of our monitoring as well as giving us a bonus of the predictive functionality to find issues before they cause problems.

Pros and Cons

Ease of setup--agentless
Flexible in terms of configuring alerts and thresholds
Cost effective

Windows client has some issues. When you have small time intervals for your data collection, it can cause the client to become unresponsive and require you to restart it.
It takes more time to get the web client running than it does to get the windows client running.
The visualizations have been the same for the last eight years--could use a little bit of a refresh.

Return on Investment

Quickly identify issues around deadlocks and blocking. Quickly allowing for resolution
Quickly and easily enable automation around issues so we can reduce the amount of time it takes for resolution of issues
Having built-in tools to view things such as index fragmentation--allows you to quickly find correlations in performance issues

Alternatives Considered

Spotlight, Redgate SQL Monitor, SQL Sentry and SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

All the toolsets we looked at have the same basic feature sets. We felt like IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server had more features (SQL Doctor features) and better historical features. More toolsets now have a lot of these features, but for eight years, IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server led the pack in these areas.

Key Insights

Do you think IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server's feature set?

Yes

Did IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Slack, GitHub, SQL Server Integration Services, Amazon QuickSight

Likelihood to Recommend

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server is well suited for monitoring your SQL server instances, either standalone, clustered or always-on-availability groups. I believe the best scenario is on production servers. For development instances, perhaps it is not as cost effective. There may be more cost-effective solutions in those types of scenarios.

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server fits the bill

Overall Satisfaction with IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server