Item: SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Rating: 7
Author: Adrian Pinington

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it with certain clients who are not technically experienced with deep understanding of issues that may impact SQL performance - specifically when it comes to the performance monitoring of software we have installed with them. Usually it helps us identify where bottlenecks are impacting performance so that the client may reconfigure issues in their network/resource allocation.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to interpret interface.
Allows for performance bottlenecks to be quickly identified.
Low footprint.
Brings important parameters and variables together on one screen which is helpful.

Cons

To get SQL Sentry to work properly one needs a reasonable understanding of Microsoft tokens and counters. Including something to hand hold and guide inexperienced users for a typical set up would be good.
A more accessible guide to tokens and counters and what they mean (smart help manual) - would be useful.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited to bottleneck identification - could be a little more helpful for network related problems.

Would it be possible to provide some way to point at remote servers with appropriate corporate hand shaking? We install our software with several clients, and it would be good if we could get through an approval process to point at their environment for intermittent ad-hoc problem solving issues. Continuous monitoring would not be needed, but monitoring whilst doing some observed tests - e.g. running specific sprocs on a specific dataset [would be good].

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings

Comments

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Rachel Siragusa
(Vendor Representative) commented 9 years ago
Hello Adrian, Thank you for taking the time to offer your suggestions for improving SQL Sentry products in the future. In order to help guide users through some of the more complex situations and advanced tokens and counters, we have created a User Guide (http://www.sqlsentry.com/help/ug/#Performance_Metrics.html). This guide provides descriptions for many of the performance counters that we utilize. Additionally, several counters list the suggested thresholds and provide links to supplemental information, including information on how they affect performance. In addition to this resource, our Custom Conditions provides counter descriptions and their importance to overall performance in the condition descriptions. To easily view these descriptions, go to the Conditions List (Navigator Pane > Custom Conditions > Conditions List). The SQL Sentry blog site also has several posts featuring this topic (http://blogs.sqlsentry.com/category/custom-conditions/). If you have any further questions or concerns regarding which counters SQL Sentry uses, our Support team will be happy to help you (Support@sqlsentry.com). We appreciate your feedback and thank you for being a part of the SQL Sentry family.

TSAP (modest user) Review