SQLSentry Performance Advisor helped me manage my SQL Server environment
April 26, 2016
SQLSentry Performance Advisor helped me manage my SQL Server environment
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor has been used as a primary monitoring tool for our production environment, it has helped us a lot with troubleshooting bottlenecks, finding performance problems, resolving blocking etc. We're using this tool across the whole organization and monitoring around fifteen large production SQL Servers.
- I can see global view of all my monitored servers on single screen with CPU, Memory, Disk & network usages based on last sample or even historical for upto 3 days. Also if there is an area of concerns Performance Advisor will highlighted that server with red or orange depending upon the condition or level of concerns.
- Blocking and deadlock situations are clearly visible which gives insight to resolve conflicts.
- Disk Activity section provides clear visibility of each and every data files (.MDF, .LDF & .NDF) with the level of activity (Read & Write operations) which is very helpful for us for our OLTP environment to monitor and keep a watch on response from storage system.
- Alert system is good.
- I believe SQL Sentry has good alert mechanism but still I see a room for improvement, for example recently we tried to change subject line of specific type of alerts (for example server offline, or high CPU utilization etc.) to make it more meaningful for our organization and we had hard time doing this.
- Reports need some improvement, reports are good but I believe few summary report need to be added which reflects overall performance of the environment. For example downtime report is available which serves the purpose of availability but having similar reports to reflect high level performance reporting would be helpful.
- In the global view under the disk section ms/IO shows the values based on the sample and changes the color from depending upon threshold which is a good feature. Also, upon right click it allows to generate quick report which again shows time & value for ms/IO. So, it would be a great feature if SQL Sentry can add a functionality to show which particular LUN(s) is responding slowly.
We evaluated couple of product on certain parameters like global view, performance tuning recommendations, analysis, expensive/long running queries, IO information, alerts, dashboard, reports, licensing model and pricing etc. We decided to select SQL Sentry Performance Advisor because of it was far head or other products in few areas specially - dashboard, historical performance analysis (drill-down capability), global view of all the monitored servers, provides very detail level of IO operation on the disk level as well as database file level latency etc.