SQL Sentry - A magic wand of the quest for how to become a more peaceful DBA or just another life jacket
February 18, 2016

SQL Sentry - A magic wand of the quest for how to become a more peaceful DBA or just another life jacket

Vasilis Papamichael | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor

We're using it (ICT department) as a central information point for company wide production SQL infrastructures. It quickly help us to pinpoint issues related to blocking, deadlocks, poor performing SQL queries and the subsystem (server components) as well.

Pros

  • As a software, it is synonymous to "1 picture is worth a 1000 words". It has the ability to give you at a glance all the necessary information related to databases, instances, networking and server, both in live and historical views
  • From a visualized approach it is very well designed. The row of information is structured in a such way that an experienced DBA can quickly pinpoint any SQL or platform issue or analyze the trends as well.
  • It offers a customization level which can be combined with numerous automation tasks covering any need beyond the basic monitor-alert-analyze-remedy.
  • From every aspect, SQL Sentry is an excellent choice in terms of ROI.

Cons

  • It would be nice if the program could offer a solution to remedy problems related to poor query performance i.e. to suggest the addition or removal of an index.
Sentry is more centralized and wide open. It has abilities to "dive" into deepest SQL aspects providing details that other products are just unable to do. It is not just a quick monitoring, alerting tool. It has the unique ability to "teach" or "remind" you (throughout policies and automation) solutions that were difficult to recall under pressure.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings

SQL Performance Monitoring
10.0
Performance dashboard
10
Intelligent alerting
10
Top SQL
10
Historical trend data
10

Comments

  • Rachel Siragusa | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Rachel Siragusa
    commented 10 years ago
    Hello Vasilis, We appreciate your kind review and we’re glad to hear that you have found SQL Sentry helpful. Do you know about our Index Analysis feature available in the latest version of SQL Sentry? The Index Analysis feature is a part of the integrated Plan Explorer, and will be implemented into the stand alone Plan Explorer in the near future. With this feature, we will display columns used in a particular index and some statistics on those columns, runtime vs compiled values, show data skew through the statistics histogram, show missing indexes, and show recommended indexes based on a scoring system. You can even drop/create indexes, as well as update statistics right through the client. For more details on this feature, make sure to check out the blog post linked below. -http://blogs.sqlsentry.com/aaronbertrand/sql-sentry-v10-index-analysis/ If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact the Support team directly at Support@sqlsentry.com. Thank you for your continued support of SQL Sentry!

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