Item: SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Rating: 10
Author: terry anthony

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is being used to identify and optimize user created stored procedures, views and functions that perform inefficiently so they can be optimized to run at peak efficiency. It is used to alert the IT and operations staff of events that are causing the SQL server instance to become unstable and go offline or restart.

Pros and Cons

Monitors long running queries and alerts on them.
Provides context for the poorly performing query such as the user running the query, start and end times, number of reads and writes the query or queries has performed.
Reporting on SQL server top poorly performing queries and provides context to be able to determine why the queries are having such poor performance.

Provide an interface to perform ad-hoc queries of the data in the SQL Sentry database or a way to export the data for more detailed analysis.
More detail in the online and local help. More examples that address 'real world' issues.

Alternatives Considered

Idera SQL Diagnostic Manager

The former company I worked for had such an extremely large and high volume transaction volume. Idera's SQL Diagnostic Manager just could not keep up with the pace of the transactions. The main SQL server cluster was running between 25,000 to 50,000 transactions per second (24 hours a day) with between 25,000 and 32,000 simultaneous user connections. SQL Sentry was the only Windows and SQL sever monitoring tool that could actually keep pace with the daily processes.

Likelihood to Recommend

Monitoring real time Windows server health metrics and SQL server metrics presented in a graphical interface that makes issues imminently apparent is where SQL Sentry Performance advisor excels. It allows a very quick response to current server conditions (both Windows and SQL server) when issues occur. Disk space analysis is less helpful, especially with virtual servers.

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Rachel Siragusa
commented 8 years ago
Hello Terry, We appreciate you reviewing SQL Sentry. I am so glad to hear that it has been helpful in identifying performance issues. We are working on expanding the resources available to help customers not only use our products, but also to pinpoint and resolve real world issues. With a countless number of combinations of settings, configurations, security measures, and hardware, it is very difficult to provide broad solutions that will be universally applicable. However, we are working to provide resources that will help interpret the data we are collecting. This will allow users to take more calculated and efficient actions to resolve performance issues. Make sure to check out the links in the descriptions of each custom condition. They will direct you to helpful blog posts regarding the related counters, issues, and possible solutions. In addition, I would highly recommend checking out our blog site, as well as the blogs at SQL Skills. These blog posts can help to identify certain issues or make correlations given the data we are collecting. -http://blogs.sqlsentry.com/ -https://www.sqlskills.com/ In addition, we also have our Professional Services team, who are a group of experienced DBAs and System Engineers. They will be happy to help in identifying particular issues and how to resolve them. -http://www.sqlsentry.com/pro-services Thank you for being a valued member of the SQL Sentry family!

In the Daily SQL war zone with a trusted partner: SQL Sentry

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros and Cons

Alternatives Considered

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings