Advantages of SQL Sentry Performance Advisor
February 19, 2016

Advantages of SQL Sentry Performance Advisor

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor

SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is the primary source of real-time and historical activity on our major SQL Servers. This is an invaluable tool used in providing application users feedback on problem areas in their application. It also provides insight into growth requirements.
  • Identification of what resources are being waited for.
  • The top SQL for locating abusive queries with the full query and execution plan is invaluable.
  • The ability to select a historical timeframe and zoom into a problem area is invaluable.
  • The monitoring (alerting) feature is anything but straightforward. Simplification and/or better documentation would be greatly appreciated.
  • Historical user connections would help immensely in problem determination.
  • Being able to search back beyond the last deadlock or blocking query.
In our opinion SQL Sentry Performance Advisor was a more complete mature tool with a great dashboard view where MANY critical elements of SQL Server performance are brought together in a single place. The historical view of data is immensely valuable. The visualization of AlwaysOn Availability Groups is quite helpful and being able to see the volume of data helps determine hot servers. Last but not least is this tool was created by database administrators for actual database administration. It is not just a collection of metrics. It is actually useful for daily use and problem determination.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is well suited to our environment of a combination of standalone, Windows Failover Clusters and numerous AlwaysON clusters. One downside is the for each instance of a cluster another license is required. This can make licensing very expensive.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings

Performance dashboard
9
Intelligent alerting
6
Top SQL
9
Historical trend data
9
Virtualization support
5