Item: SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Rating: 7
Author: Sanket Rao

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SQL Sentry Performance Advisor to monitor our multiple live applications across the board. It is mainly used by the database administrators and network and windows team. Since SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is more helpful from an SQL Server perspective, it is mainly used for monitoring and troubleshooting of SQL Server performance.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The SQL Sentry Performance Advisor Dashboard can come in one of the top five features as it represents all required basic resources such as Network, CPU, System Memory and DISK I/Os from a Windows perspective and SQL Server Activity, SQL Waits, SQL Memory and Database I/O's from SQL Server prospect. As the word represents ‘dashboard', it also helps me to dive deeper to investigate in a specific time window to find which activities were occurring at a given point in time.
Another good feature of SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is monitoring the top SQL of your monitoring application, and since one can customize the monitoring options based on the application severity it is easy to monitor the application. SQL Sentry Performance Advisor has helped us identify a significant performance threat.
SQL Sentry Performance Advisor also notifies of blocking SQL and deadlocks with a proper description of occurrence and also provides detailed information to rectify and resolve any such issue.

Cons

We have faced quite a few difficulties monitoring SQL Servers externally. In other words it is difficult to monitor SQL Servers from a different network or SQL Servers which are hosted in cloud. There are also some issues with the consistency of connectivity when monitoring SQL Servers residing in Cloud.

Likelihood to Recommend

SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is a helpful tool especially for database administrators but as described earlier, there are few areas for improvement.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings

Comments

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Rachel Siragusa
(Vendor Representative) commented 9 years ago
Hello Sanket, We appreciate the additional insight you have provided which we can use to make SQL Sentry a better product. We are always working to make data collection as efficient as possible. Today, DBAs are monitoring a very wide range of environments spread out across the globe. This creates several complexities. This can become even more difficult when you aren’t in control of certain networking or connectivity configurations, such has those hosted by 3rd parties. If you haven’t already, be sure to run any potential issues past our Support team, as there may be some slight adjustments we can make (support@sqlsentry.com). Thank you for being a valued SQL Sentry customer!

SQL Sentry Performance Advisor - Helpful, Reliable, Life Saver !!!