Item: SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Rating: 7
Author: Justin Wang, MBA, MSc, MMA (in progress)

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used SolarWinds DPA to monitor two of our main production MS SQL Servers. We are running our ERP, WMS, and several other key applications on these two main SQL Servers.

Since we don't have a full-time DBA, we are not using DPA to its fullest, we mainly use it as a troubleshooting tool when needed.

There were a number of incidences when we had serious performance issues on the SQL Server, and DPA was able to help us to narrow down the type of issue, and the process that was causing the issue, which helped us to get the issue resolved quickly (by killing the process causing the deadlocks, etc.)

At the beginning of our DPA deployment, it also helped us to identify a number of expensive queries that will need to be optimized so that we can focus on improving these queries, and as the result of this, we improved the overall system performance.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It provided a clear picture of how the system is performing, and which queries took the longest time to run.
For the queries that took a long time to run, it provided us with the detailed analysis and recommendation on where was the problem and how to improve.
When system has deadlocks -- it helped us to narrow down exactly which process was causing the problem, so that we were able to just kill that specific process to get the problem fixed, without the need to shut down all applications and reboot the whole SQL server.

Cons

We also have one SQL server that has very light workloads, but from time to time DPA will still show CPU or query alerts on that server, which I believe were the false positives.

Return on Investment

In the past 4 years, DPA helped us to troubleshoot around 10 incidences of SQL server performance issue.
We normally have no performance issue on SQL Servers, those incidences are all we had encountered since we deployed BPA. The good thing is, DPA was able to provide some kind of help in every case.
With the help from DPA, we were able to resolve the issues quickly (normally within 5 to 10 minutes), and avoided shutting down the production systems during business hours.

Alternatives Considered

Quest Foglight and IDERA SQL Server Diagnostics Manager.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have SQL Servers with very heavy workloads, and the applications on the SQL Servers are mission critical, then you better to have a tool like DPA that can help you to monitor the system's performance and help you to do troubleshooting.

The more SQL Servers you have, the heavier the workloads on these servers, the better chance you can get a bigger ROI from BPA.

Compared to the impact to the business on potential downtime due to performance issues on SQL Servers, the cost of getting BPA in place is very minimum.

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My SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Review