I highly recommend Performance Advisor if you manage MSSQL
May 13, 2016
I highly recommend Performance Advisor if you manage MSSQL
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor
We use Performance Advisor to monitor our database servers. We use this tool within the IT department to pinpoint pressure points, search for expensive queries, and for capacity planning of our databases. From a business perspective, this tool helps us to address performance problems introduced by new code and plan for new infrastructure.
- Easy to setup in a Microsoft shop that depends on Active Directory
- Alerting cover a range of issues
- Detailed trace information can be retrieved and stored on demand
- Records blocking and deadlock events
- Records disk contention over time
- Records disk utilization over time
- The disk utilization overview does not seem to accurately display volumes created using a software RAID
- It is difficult to determine what isolation level was used for a query.
- The deadlock and blocking queries tab does not record transaction isolation level either. This would help since knowing the transaction isolation level for a query would help us choose a more appropriate isolation level for the blocking transactions.
- DBTuna
We used to use DBTuna. DBTuna recorded every query, but did not record server health statistics. I believe Performance Advisor was able to deliver more information about our system, and have lower impact. When I introduced the tool to our CTO and a lot of our programmers, I was able to show them that SQL Sentry was able to correlate performance on a server with specific queries. This helped give us a complete picture of specific incidents.