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SQL Sentry makes my job easier
Updated April 21, 2021

SQL Sentry makes my job easier

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

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry

We use SentryOne to monitor our Production SQL instances for the entire organization. We choose SentryOne as our monitoring solution to reduce dependency on custom written alerts. This eliminates having to maintain custom alert compatibility with different versions of SQL Server and we are confident in the best practice standards SentryOne uses to develop their alerts. SentryOne is my first place to go when problems arise, and SentryOne is usually the first to let me know there is a problem.
  • Because of previous products, we had been accustomed to receiving emails for our alerts. SentryOne provides this functionality with great features like not using it for everything monitored to preventing our mailbox from being flooded by controlling alerts to a certain amount in a time frame (customizable) and an alert to tell you that limit has been reached.
  • SentryOne provides a great blocking page to help understand a blocking chain quickly. It is also configurable to ignore short term blocking that hasn't run long enough to be of concern.
  • Top-SQL has been a helpful feature to recognize processes or jobs that run beyond their normal run time. Also, helpful when looking for what was running during times an issue has come up and we need to see what was running in the past.
  • There is still some work to do with the baseline data. I am sure there are a great number of alerts that could be created using this data to highlight variations beyond normal.
  • All the alerts have the ability to trigger a response, providing some best practice configurations of these might help us to use these features more often.
  • Could use better documentation on the ports and firewall settings needed during the process of adding an instance to monitoring. This has proven to be different than what is used once monitoring is setup.
It has been a while now since using the Idera product, but SQL Sentry seems to provide greater configuration and alerting options. SQL Sentry offers 12 different options, all of which are configurable individually for each alert. It can be done at the global level as well as by a server. Even when configured at a global level, it can be changed to an individual server level or group of servers as needed.
SQL Sentry has a very simple to follow layout for configuration and is easily adapted to each instance that has special requirements. Also, having the option to configure an alert to do more than one action is invaluable. Using the Alerting Channel, emails, and running scripts to address the issue automatically provides great value. Being able to set time windows of when to monitor and not monitor, as well as turning off all monitoring as needed by the server or reducing unneeded alerts during maintenance.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings

SQL Performance Monitoring
9.4
Performance dashboard
9
Intelligent alerting
10
Top SQL
9
Historical trend data
9
Virtualization support
10

SQL Sentry Business Processes

  • We are a small organization and limited budget, and we found SentryOne to be more cost effective than other tools.
  • While it is possible to do all this monitoring ourselves, it is not cost effective to design and maintain a custom monitoring solution. SentryOne provides an easy to maintain solution.
  • The many built-in alerts along with the ability to add custom alerts or customize these alerts either globally or by instance, make this product great, but even greater is the ability to configure many ways to respond to the alert.
  • Price
  • Product Reputation
The decision to change monitoring solutions is a major decision with many variables. We needed to reduce our cost, but not reduce our protection. The reputation of the SentryOne product and the team behind the product is what made this decision possible.