SQL Sentry Review
June 25, 2020
SQL Sentry Review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry
We use SQL Sentry to monitor and alert on our SQL Server Environment. It helps us troubleshoot live issues as they occur using the dashboard and Top SQL. The history allows us to look back and investigate issues that have already happened. The built in baselines help us compare current metrics with historical norms. The dashboard gives us the a great view to analyze CPU, waits, disk latency and many other metrics on a single screen. There are some good out of the box reports. It is a powerful and flexible tool.
- The performance dashboard makes it easy to get a quick overview of the current state of the DB server.
- All monitoring tools have overhead. SQL Sentry does a good job of making the data collection as efficient as possible. I have seen performance issues with another 3rd party monitoring tool. I have not seen any with SQL Sentry.
- Highlighting a significant period on the dashboard (like high CPU, large waits etc) and jumping to Top SQL is very handy.
- There is a bit of a learning curve when setting up advisory conditions (ie alerts on specific metrics).
- The Top SQL tab does a great job at big resource hogs. However the small, frequently executed queries are not as easy to analyze with this tool.
I like SQL Sentry the best. Foglight was a long time ago and way more comprehensive tool than I needed at the time. Diagnostic Manager has some good features but I had some capacity and performance issues at times with it. SQL Sentry has been consistent and effective at monitoring our environment.