Item: SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Rating: 9
Author: Louis Fritz

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SentryOne in our production (over 120 Instance worldwide and growing). It gives us an easy way to navigate the dashboard to quickly identify a performance problem and the ability to drill into the issue quickly and come up with a game plan to address the performance problem.

Pros and Cons

Alerting is very flexible and configurable to our needs
Linking alerting into third party alerting tools via PowerShell was easy
Collecting and rolling up SQL statements make it much easier to troubleshoot performance problems
Drilling into PLE and what’s happening when it drops out
Ease of drilling into time-frame to figure out what was the issue at that time
Being able to query the SentryOne database for management reports is awesome (Deadlocks and Blocking)

Navigation could be improved. It can be hard to follow if you are new to the tool
Calendar of events could use some work. Display can be confusing at times

Other Software Used

Solarwinds Database Performance Analyzer for SQL Server, Redgate SQL Monitor

Likelihood to Recommend

It’s great for a DBA to have a tool like SentryOne. To be able to troubleshoot our production environment and come up with a root cause to a performance issue in very little time is awesome. Being able to drill into an instance and see what happened yesterday when a user walks up to our desk and tells us the instance was slow yesterday and they want to know what was going on.

SentryOne is an Awesome Product

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros and Cons

Other Software Used

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings