Item: SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Rating: 8
Author: ARTHUR ARBUCKLE

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is being used for monitoring production and staging SQL Servers. The main tabs used are Top SQL, Blocking, and Deadlocks. Fragmentation Manager is primary used to monitor fragmentation percentage. We do not use it at this time to actually defrag the indexes. Plan Explorer is my primary tool for query plan review and optimization.

Pros and Cons

Quickly drill down from Top SQL to query plan and dashboard to evaluate performance and bottlenecks.
Demonstrated for me that several of the SQL Servers were over allocated in resources. I used it to tune the right amount of cores and memory.
Alerts, alerts, and more alerts. A level of notification and communication I would not have without the tool.

It has a lot functionality, the learning curve is pretty large. I would like to see more videos with more detail.

Alternatives Considered

Much more organized and easier to use than Profiler and Activity Monitor. Job failure monitoring is critical.

Likelihood to Recommend

I still use Activity Monitor and Profiler because I have not found the exact replacement in SQL Sentry Performance Advisor yet.

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Rachel Siragusa
(Vendor Representative) commented 8 years ago
Hello Arthur, We appreciate your review of our products, and for taking the time to provide us with some great information. SQL Sentry is a deep product, with a vast variety of features and configurations. Though we do this to allow users to configure the product in a way that best suits their environments, this does come at a cost of a learning curve. However, we are actively working on documentation and resources to help ease this curve: -We have a new demo scheduling site. You can sign up for a time that best fits your schedule to have a demo with our experienced and knowledgeable Sales Engineers. These demos provide a great showcase of feature sets, as well as provide a platform for any questions you might have. (http://www.meetme.so/SQLSentrySEGroup). -We now provide an On-Boarding process to new users. This process includes documentation listing crucial resources and information. In addition, we will make sure the initial set up of SQL Sentry goes smoothly and is working as expected, while providing an overview of navigating the product and features. -The SQL Sentry TV site provides videos demonstrating some of SQL Sentry’s features as well as general SQL Server topics. While some of these are slightly dated, they do show core functionality, and we are working to upload more recent videos. (http://sqlsentry.tv/ ) -The SQL Sentry blog site also has great posts on product features and SQL Server topics in general. (http://blogs.sqlsentry.com/ ) (Ex: http://blogs.sqlsentry.com/greggonzalez/sql-sentry-v8-intelligent-alerting-redefined/ ) -We are also expanding our SQL Sentry Essentials training. Currently this is a whole course, but we have plans to itemize the modules, allowing you to take only the modules that best fit your needs. (http://www.sqlsentry.com/pro-services/essentials ) Many of us are experienced DBAs and understand the large workload that comes with the job title. We know that it can be difficult to find the time to become acclimated with a product such as ours. We are continuing to try and find ways to help our users get started with our product so they can get the most out of it with as much ease as possible. We appreciate your support and thank you for being a valued SQL Sentry customer!

First impressions of SQL Sentry Performance Advisor

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