While expensive SQL Sentry is the most complete proactive monitoring and reactive troubleshooting tool I've used for SQL Server
July 27, 2021

While expensive SQL Sentry is the most complete proactive monitoring and reactive troubleshooting tool I've used for SQL Server

Andrew Gould | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds SQL Sentry

I manage the department that is responsible for all of the company's databases. We use SolarWinds SQL Sentry for monitoring our SQL servers proactively as well as reactive troubleshooting.

Pros

  • The Top SQL functionality has been extremely useful for identifying poorly performing queries by resource consumption.
  • The flexibility of creating your own Advisory Conditions has allowed us to integrate our custom internal alerts into a centralized dashboard and alerting platform.
  • Being able to highlight any chart on the dashboard and then tool-matching that window across all the other charts makes it much easier to correlate the different performance metrics against each other.

Cons

  • While creating Advisory Conditions is extremely flexible it can be a bit challenging to get everything correct. Some sort of interactive tutorial would be really helpful.
  • The alert messages are very detailed, but it takes a bit to learn how to parse them. Some sort of enriched HTML format would be a nice quality of life improvement.
  • There are half a million configurable options in multiple places. Some sort of search feature would be fantastic.

Do you think SolarWinds SQL Sentry delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SolarWinds SQL Sentry's feature set?

Yes

Did SolarWinds SQL Sentry live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SolarWinds SQL Sentry go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SolarWinds SQL Sentry again?

Yes

We chose SolarWinds SQL Sentry because it met more of our requirements than any other single tool. Proactive monitoring, quick collection times (every few seconds vs minutes), flexible custom alerting as well as in-depth data for performance analysis (Top SQL is by far my favorite feature).
Of all the tools I've used, SolarWinds SQL Sentry's Top Query has been the single most helpful tool in helping me identify which queries are putting a load on our servers and at what times. This greatly simplifies my job in prioritizing tuning. Having Plan Explorer directly linked to the tool is icing on the cake.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings

SQL Performance Monitoring
10.0
Performance dashboard
10
Intelligent alerting
10
Top SQL
10
Historical trend data
10
Virtualization support
Not Rated

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