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Great tool that works for you, not against you
March 15, 2019

Great tool that works for you, not against you

Les Robinson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

We have a hosted environment (in the cloud) and before we had this product if there was any type of blip, slowness/lockup we had zero insight as to what could have caused it. SolarWinds allows us to go back in Hx and see what happened and sometimes even offers up a suggestion on tuning about how best to handle it in the future.
  • Catches long-running queries that would normally have to sit and watch to catch.
  • Ensures the resources on the server are adequate if not gives you a birds-eye view on when it gets bad and returns to normal. For example, maybe in the middle of the night when you are asleep, knowing the CPU is maxing wouldn't be an issue, as you would see this in the Hx information.
  • If you have long-running queries and are aware of them, you can mark those with a name, either keep them on the Hx chart or set them aside to focus on new issues.
  • There is not a lot, but one thing I would suggest is when SolarWinds gives you reported information— for example, this query has run 1500 times, for a total of 56 million reads—It doesn't have a way to break it down and show me all queries that have read 500K or larger. Much like a SQL profiler would.
  • It has allowed us to scale back on RAM, because if you have some long-running stored procedures that consistently flush your tempDB, then adding RAM covers up the issue, but doesn't fix the problem.
  • As I am only monitoring 3 or 4 servers, the impact it has on our customer base is massive because it allows us to fix the issue once and it be replicated across customer base.
  • the direct ROI is manpower. it replaces having to watch performance monitor 24/7.
SolarWinds is dynamic. I have put this in our data center and monitored 5 servers at once. I have split it up between both data centers (2 here and 2 there), then installed it on a customers server to get insight into what is happening. I have run into this issue once or twice, but if you do not have a SQL environment running, Microsoft has a free version of SQL Express. The problem is SolarWinds is not the easiest when it comes to scaling back the information so that it fits on Express. if you only need 5 days or so, then it would be fine.