SentryOne worked for us!
November 18, 2019

SentryOne worked for us!

Corey Carrender | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry

Currently, the DBA team is the primary user of SQL Sentry. We use it for monitoring and performance tuning as well as mining the data for our own internal reporting. We have recently been rolling it out to other teams within Data Services (Data Engineers, Data Warehouse, etc.) and developers as well. The other groups use it for performance tuning and SQL Agent job reporting/history.
  • Historical Performance
  • VERY Customizable
  • Solid, Intuitive Interface
  • Excellent Customer Service and Prompt Assistance
  • Sometimes the UI can be cluttered. (Although SQL Sentry has worked with us to fix this)
We evaluated several monitoring tools before choosing SQL Sentry:
Solarwinds
DataDog
dbForge
Idera
RedGate

We chose SQL Sentry for several reasons: customization options, Solid UI, and, what we saw to be, the best performance/cost ratio. But the main reason was the people we worked with during POC. They were accommodating, patient, and prompt during testing and have been every bit of that since.
As a DBA, SQL Sentry has been extremely suited for most scenarios where I would need a monitoring tool. The primary thing I use it for is alerting. The default alerts are beneficial, and you can make custom alerts for seemingly anything you can think of.

The only downfall I could think of is how it aggregates historical data, and you cannot get as granular with older data. However, I completely understand the need for this, and it may even be something that can be done, we just haven't asked them about it yet.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings

Performance dashboard
10
Intelligent alerting
10
Top SQL
10
Historical trend data
8
Virtualization support
10

Using SQL Sentry

30 - Database Admins
Data Engineers
Software Developers
  • Performance Tuning
  • Alerting
  • SQL Agent History
  • Customized alerts for more than DB issues
  • Job Management
  • Automated alert response
  • Increased employee efficiency
  • Increased Query performance which has lead to smaller VMs
We have loved everything about it. It has made our day to day easier and more productive.

Evaluating SQL Sentry and Competitors

Yes - Solarwinds - Geared towards server level monitoring only
RedGate - Expensive, and the Top SQL function wasn't as useful
Internal Home Grown Alerting - Unreliable
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
Several people on our team have actually had bad experiences with SQL Sentry in the past. But we decided to give them a shot after learning of the rewrite of the software. After a POC we were very impressed with it and it did better in all of our testing than our current products and the several other products we POC'd
I don't think we would. Maybe include a few other smaller companies in the POC's