Great performance tool for the experienced DBA
July 28, 2021

Great performance tool for the experienced DBA

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

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds SQL Sentry

Our organization is using SQL Sentry to monitor a group of high-profile SQL Servers for performance problems. The DBA team relies on this tool to quickly resolve performance issues -- sometimes before the users even notice something is wrong. It also helps with long-term capacity planning by giving us historical trends of many useful metrics.
  • The performance dashboards are very useful and help bring attention directly to the problem areas.
  • The alerting system is extremely customizable,, so you don't get peppered with a bunch of useless alerts that make you blind to real action-worthy alerts.
  • The reporting is powerful enough to provide exactly what you need to see trends over time.
  • The alert customization is powerful, but can be cumbersome to set up.
  • There is so much information on the screen at any given time that without some practice it can be overwhelming.

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

SQL Sentry has a LOT more information in it than the SolarWinds DPA product. Its reporting tool isn't as good either.

The IDERA product isn't as reliable as SQL Sentry and its reporting isn't nearly as good. The IDERA UI is a resource hog and isn't as intuitive.
This solution is perfect for a team with a large server count and, at least, moderate experience supporting a SQL Server environment. If the environment is smaller or the team has less experience working with SQL Server performance tuning methodologies, then the tool may be overwhelming for the users.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings

Performance dashboard
9
Intelligent alerting
9
Top SQL
9
Historical trend data
9
Virtualization support
10