My experience with SQL Sentry
February 17, 2016

My experience with SQL Sentry

Steve Gouin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor

We use SQL Sentry Performance Advisor for analysis of our production environment. It helps us to identify a slow running query and bottle neck resources like CPU, memory or disk I/O. SQL Sentry is also useful for identifying blocking issues and is very helpful to identify processes involved in deadlock. Finally SQL Sentry is our primary monitoring tool to alert us by email. SQL Sentry is only used by the development department.
  • SQL Sentry is a wonderful tool to alert us on any unusual situations that could occur on the production environment like SQL query error, jobs running longer than expected or job errors.
  • SQL Sentry provides a mobile tool that allows me to see quickly the health of each of my servers anywhere at anytime.
  • SQL Sentry allows me to correlate different counters together or [an] SQL Query quickly. It's always impressive to highlight a specific part of a CPU graph and jump in quickly to the queries involved in the peak.
  • A drill down view of the performance dashboard to see more counters when needed. For example, I had a very high latency on disk. It would be helpful to diagnose the issue if I could also access the bytes/transfer and the transfer/sec counter. There is actually no way to add those counters in the view.
  • It would be a good idea to add a Performance Dashboard customized view and give the ability to the user to define and switch between theses views.
  • The CPU usage graph could be more useful if we can identify the process that is using the CPU, because yes it's not always SQL Server.
  • When I have a very large query, it's not possible to see it completely because it is truncated. It is then impossible to replay the query in a test environment.
SQL Sentry is more powerful and simpler to use than those products.
Today a lot of applications use a data layer (like Entity Framework). This has reduced the number of queries with high duration replacing them by a lot of queries with short duration. It's then difficult to identify the query that has generated the CPU or I/O peak.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings

Performance dashboard
9
Intelligent alerting
6
Top SQL
8
Historical trend data
8