Item: SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Rating: 10
Author: Steve Gouin

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

Redgate SQL Monitor and Dell Spotlight

SQL Sentry is more powerful and simpler to use than those products.

Likelihood to Recommend

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

Comments

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Rachel Siragusa
commented 9 years ago
Hello Steve, Thank you for taking the time to review SQL Sentry and for providing some great insight into our product. I am happy to offer some information that you might find useful. If you are monitoring a server with Performance Advisor for Windows, then you have the ability to break out processes and add them to a category of your choosing. This category will then have its own color on the Dashboard. For information on how to do this, check out the link below. http://www.sqlsentry.com/help/ug/#Processes.html Regarding text data being truncated, you can increase the maximum text length through the monitoring service settings (Navigator pane > Monitoring Service > Settings > Performance Monitor > Query Collection Maximum Text Length). Note that even with this maxed out, if you have an extremely large plan that SQL Server is truncating, there are steps we can take to resolve this on our end. If this is the case, please contact our support team and they will be happy to assist you (support@sqlsentry.com). Also, make sure to utilize the Performance Counter History report (Reports > Performance Advisor > Performance > Performance Counter History). This report will allow you to select any counters you want and overlay them on the same graph for correlation analysis. Thank you for being a valued member of the SQL Sentry family.

My experience with SQL Sentry