Solarwinds DPA: Quickly Identify Production Performance Problems
Updated February 01, 2019
Solarwinds DPA: Quickly Identify Production Performance Problems
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Solarwinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) is a powerful database performance analyzer tool that is vital to our business. It is utilized by the organization to monitor hundreds of SQL Server instances that support customer businesses. The graphs and dashboards provided by the tool grant us the quick visibility into potential performance culprits that could be impacting our customers.
- Solarwinds DPA provides easy to ready graphs to identify database performance problems.
- Solarwinds DPA displays vital Availability Group health information. This is used to quickly identify the status of SQL Server Availability Groups.
- Solarwinds DPA provides a drill down capability to see current and recent activity that may be impacting performance. This easy to use interfaces is vital to quickly identifying performance problems for improved up time.
- Solarwinds DPA does a great job of analyzing commonly executed queries on SQL instances. The one thing it does not do well is gathering metrics and bubbling up ad hoc queries that may only run once and a while, or perhaps queries that supply a variety of parameters. This typically causes DPA to interpret commonly run queries with varying parameters as different queries.
- This tool drastically cuts down the time it takes to identify production impacting performance issues. This result improves the system up time to our customers, which in turn enables them to better serve their customers.
Using SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
20 - The DPA product covers more than a few hundred databases across 20+ application platforms. Monitoring this many different SQL Server instance is no easy task. Across the organization at least 20 users access this monitoring platform on a weekly basis. The business functions of these users are Support, DBAs, Developers, and Management.
2 - The DBA's support the Solarwinds platform. There is very little effort and knowledge required to support the Solarwinds Database performance Analyzer platform. Installing the product, registering database instances, and upgrading the product are simple straightforward tasks.
- Monitoring database wait times across the previous month to find regressed queries or schema changes that may effect performance.
- Reviewing index recommendations.
- Getting a quick glance look at resource utilization for things such as CPU utilization, page life expectancy, read and write latency, and blocking sessions.
Using SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using | None |
- Navigating to the trends and resources tabs for a particular instance is easy to use and provides a great deal of information.
- Solarwinds allows for support to quickly identify performance impacting queries/procs.
- The GUI does take some time to learn as there is so much information and detail provided. But the learning curve is short and the tutorial videos provided do help speed up the learning time.