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.
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.
SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings
Using SQL Sentry
30 - Database Admins
Data Engineers
Software Developers
Data Engineers
Software Developers
7 - DBAs
- 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
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
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