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Solarwinds DPA - a DBA's MVP!
November 03, 2020

Solarwinds DPA - a DBA's MVP!

Joseph Dixon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is being used by IT in our organization. It allows us to have a better window into what the SQL servers are doing, especially with regards to applications that are using these SQL servers. It allows us to root cause problems and to find problems before they become bigger problems.
  • Insight into query wait times
  • Ability to view Disk IO
  • Historical trending of wait times
  • Dated UI
  • Development servers are not free
  • Dashboard visualization of stats requires Solarwinds Performance Monitor (Included with Orion)
  • Was able to identify issues that we were able to take to one of our partners and improve the system for all users.
  • Identified an issue with storage that was also impacting other users, speeding the route to solving the problem.
  • Saves countless hours vs trying to pull these stats out of SQL server by hand. Being able to quickly find the source of the issue we are experiencing is invaluable.
We were having an issue where our check-in system was causing slowdown on SQL server. We were able to root cause the issue to some individual queries that were being generated by Entity Framework and work with the developer to rework the EF code to generate queries that were much more performant. This resulted in a significant decrease in the amount of CPU wait time we were experiencing and prevented us from needing to increase our server sizes to the next CPU tier.
Unfortunately we are not using this add-on, however it looks like it would provide great information.

Do you think SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer's feature set?

Yes

Did SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer again?

Yes

We have not needed to use support that much, but every time we do they are professional and courteous as well as responding within an expected timeframe.
I don't want to think about managing clusters of SQL servers in the future without this tool. We have demoed other tools and SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is the gold standard for usability and insight into what your servers are doing. The UI is a bit dated, but everything is laid out in a logical manner and drilling down into queries or timeslices is extremely intuitive.
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer may have a dated UI, but don't let that deter you as what it really does well is give you the data you need to find issues and resolve them with your SQL Servers. It can also do Oracle and other platforms as well. Your servers being on the cloud is NOT a problem at all and we have full visibility into our Google Cloud database instances as well as our on-prem instances within the same pane of glass. If you have MySQL or PostgreSQL you might look into Solarwinds Database Performance Monitor instead, unless you have a mixture of both and want everything in one spot.
One thing to note is that you will need to host DPA yourself, it's not a cloud solution (although you can host it in the cloud if you prefer). This also means you have complete control over where this data resides.