Item: SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our company we use SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer for proactive performance monitoring and anomaly detection in database overall health. This product gives us a first look at the big picture of the database performance. We configured some alerts and mail notifications, which saves us a lot of time. Our most common use case is to react to changed execution plans and take appropriate actions before end users of the systems start to complain about performance problem and response times.

Pros and Cons

Anomaly detection powered by machine learning - new in version 12, greatly love that statistical analysis
Compare workload versus past on daily basis and total, it really helps us to see big picture of growth and make capacity considerations
Intuitive performance analysis - easyly examine the problems and find the root cause

In the last two versions 12.0 and 12.1 SolarWinds has made great enhancements. I do not have a thing that I currently want to be changed. There are some cosmetics in the user interface but do not think that they are problems.

Return on Investment

I cannot provide quantitative data, but can give you some real positive impact example .
We had several points in the Internet banking applications which do not work as well as desired. Using DPA we identified the heaviest SQL queries and initiate a change request to the vendor. After implementing the received changes we are able to reduce response time by an order of magnitude.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think it is well suited for mission-critical databases where every percent performance is a must. Maybe it would do great work in a data warehouse too, especially in detecting performance loss in ETL jobs. Actually, I think it is well-suited in all the use cases, if you have enough licenses :).

Business Processes Supported

Constantly monitor database performanse
Alerting for database anomalies
Proactively analize database load and growth

Innovative Uses

Historical trends and anomalies detection

Future Planned Uses

Review more in depth the alerting notifications, I thing that there is a huge potential.

SolarWinds DPA is a great product to visually see the health of the databases and make a proactive monitoring and root cause analysis

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer