Item: SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am using it to monitor 5 servers running Microsoft SQL Server 2008R2, soon to be upgrading to a newer version. We have replications and many jobs including SSIS jobs that we need to maximize performance and address failures quickly in a production environment [that is] busy 365 days a year. I find that its primary benefit for me so far is in identifying job failures (notification) and identifying performance problems and giving some information that helps resolve them.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It identifies deadlocks and long running queries and shows exactly how the problems are occurring.
It shows performance of your server in real time, especially the metrics that actually tell you useful things.
It lets you change the monitoring to another server without a terrible hassle when this is desired.

Cons

Some link to what each metric is telling you and how you may use it to judge performance or use it to improve performance would be very nice. A number of the folks who use this product, and me, were not computer science majors or or professional server managers. Managing and monitoring servers is an ancillary duty that just got added on.

Other Software Used

SQL Server Integration Services, Microsoft SQL Server, Adobe Flash

Likelihood to Recommend

SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is well suited to production environments where performance and high reliability are important and the SQL environments see heavy, complicated use, including SSIS jobs, complex views and queries, replication, and other features that require you to get the most out of the hardware and software that you have to get a job done or get more efficient.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings

Comments

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Rachel Siragusa
(Vendor Representative) commented 9 years ago
Hello, We appreciate you taking the time to provide us with some great input. I would like to take this opportunity to provide you with some additional information based on your comments. Below is a link that describes many of the performance metrics that we collect. Several of the sub-links also provide recommended thresholds. -http://www.sqlsentry.com/help/ug/#Performance_Metrics.html In addition to this resource, our Custom Conditions provide counter descriptions and their importance to overall performance in the condition details. To easily view these details, go to the Conditions List (Navigator Pane > Custom Conditions > Conditions List). The SQL Sentry blog site also has several posts featuring performance related topic. -http://blogs.sqlsentry.com/ If you have any questions or need any additional assistance, please do not hesitate to contact our Support team at Support@sqlsentry.com. Thank you for being a valued member of the SQL Sentry family!

I like SQL Sentry