30 days after installation, the number of false alerts in the environment went to almost 0 from our previous monitoring tool.
February 12, 2016

30 days after installation, the number of false alerts in the environment went to almost 0 from our previous monitoring tool.

Nathan Heaivilin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor

At present, it is only being used by the DBA Team. This is due to the size of our environment and the scope of the installation. Once things are cleaned up and running as expected, we will start to allows others into the environment.

Pros

  • Customizing Notification and alerts is great. You can really narrow down what you want to be woken up for in the middle of the night.
  • The polling machines are great for a large environment for ensuring scale out and redundancy

Cons

  • The application UI is painful to use if there is any latency between it and the database (and sometimes even then). This might be due to the large environment and the number of instances we are waiting, but it does make it using it for troubleshooting challenging at times, especially if you are remote working on a VPN.
  • There are some confusing things in the UI. Nodes turn red for specific failures, but not others. Why shouldn't you be able to clear any alert? Why not be able to clear a cluster fail over, with adding a note saying "emergency failure due to incident XXXXXXX", but be able to clear a SQL Agent job alert with the same type of note?
  • When inserting new instances, it has to check all domains that are in the list, not just the domain that the machine is being added into. This can be painful when inserting a new machine from a different domain across the pond.
For us, there were 3 big items that swung SQL Sentry.
1) customization of alerts and notification
2) polers in other domains allow for a more secure deployment. In addition, the polers allow for redundancy, ensuring we are spending time fighting fires, not fixing the fire fighting tools.
3) default data collection and windows counters get the right information without customization.
Given that we are still configuring the production and still learning it, it is to early to say either way. We believe this is the best tool we reviewed, but only time will tell if it was the right choice.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings

SQL Performance Monitoring
6.3
Performance dashboard
6
Intelligent alerting
9
Top SQL
6
Historical trend data
4
Virtualization support
Not Rated

Comments

  • Rachel Siragusa | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Rachel Siragusa
    (Vendor Representative) commented 9 years ago
    Hello Nathan, Thank you for providing some helpful insights on SQL Sentry. If you are having issues with the client performance, make sure you are performing regular maintenance on the SQL Sentry database. Also, given that general poor network performance can cause issues in the efficiency in which the client can return data, one option would be to use a client on the server hosting the SQL Sentry database to limit the network traffic required. In regards to the clearing of condition statuses., this can be done through the Events Log (Navigator pane > Custom Conditions > Events Log). On this page, you can close particular conditions that have evaluated to true, assign them to users, and add notes. If you have any questions or continued issues, please don’t hesitate to contact our Support team (support@sqlsentry.com). We are always working on creating the best user experience possible and will continue to work to make the jobs of our users easier. We appreciate your input and suggestions. Thank you for being a valued member of the SQL Sentry family.

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