Datadog vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

A one-stop solution for everything you need. Multiple functionalities are tailored to meet specific business needs. Logs are essential for any business, and Datadog manages logs effectively. Rum sessions are something new to me and have given us a new perspective on how to reverse engineer issues that we see for our customers.

Incentivized

I believe that SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is a great choice for an organization that does not have a specific DBA or one that is still growing into the role. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is filled with hints, tips, and explanations of the various readings and metrics. This is very useful to help understand what is happening and why, what it means, and what some potential solutions are towards remediating any issues. This is extremely valuable for our development team, allowing them to be more proactive with the queries they write in viewing how they perform and where bottlenecks might be.

Incentivized

• Create Dashboards as per application, environments, and Custom metrics in one panel.
• Log aggregation, one-stop Application monitoring tools for the whole infrastructure.
• Playbooks, SLA definition, success and error quotas, request visualizations.
• DB monitoring, Serverless stack monitoring.
• Alerting of Production incidents so we can quickly resolve the issues on time.

Incentivized

• Ability to drill down to wait for the issue and have a clear path as to what may be causing the issue.
• Ability to quickly add a new target and the ease of installation and upgrades.
• Reporting features to group my most troublesome customers into a daily report in one email.
• Excellent customer support on any issues I can't immediately solve.

Incentivized

• Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
• I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
• I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame

Incentivized

• Resiliency of the Monitoring checks after the server underwent maintenance reboot. My experience is the monitor (Action) needs to be started manually. If possible it can automatically detect service/server then start to monitor again when system is back up.
• Much lighter UI.
• Granularity up to minutes.

Incentivized

We have relied on this product for a very long time and it continues to exceed expectations. The product is a vital part of our organization at this point, it would not be very ideal for us to abandon it. We use it almost every day and depend on its alerts for critical parts of our business

Incentivized

Datadog's user interface is quite friendly and easy to navigate. With menus clearly categorized, and ability to bookmark important dashboards, one can easily find what they're looking for. For dashboards, ability to move and resize visualizations and group them, is really helpful to organize dashboards. Automatic suggestions from Datadog for important visualizations based on the metrics and logs would provide another level of ease of use.

Incentivized

I don't want to think about managing clusters of SQL servers in the future without this tool. We have demoed other tools and SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is the gold standard for usability and insight into what your servers are doing. The UI is a bit dated, but everything is laid out in a logical manner and drilling down into queries or timeslices is extremely intuitive.

Incentivized

The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.

Incentivized

I have had to use their support on a few occasions, for reasons that I am not clear about until recently I have always had problems upgrading the software (although the last 2 updates have gone without issue which I am very pleased to say). On those unfortunate occasions, the support has been brilliant with either excellently documented guides on how to resolve the issue by myself or have been hands-on with calls and screen sharing to remotely fix the issue. Every time the problem was sorted and more importantly, nothing was lost (apart from a bit of time). And as I stated above whatever the problem was that was causing my upgrade issues appears to have been resolved in the last 2 updates.

Incentivized

Follow the guidelines for the capacity of the servers. We found that the DPA databases were getting rather large and also that there are ways to reduce their size built into some of the options.

Incentivized

I selected Datadog because of its features and the wide range of integration support. As I already told it supports more that 600+ integrations which helps and organization to keep everything in a single place and also its AI feature which is reducing the time for root cause analysis. Its custom dashboards features which helps us to visualize the data in a more attractive way.

Incentivized

I have used Spotlight (for Oracle on RAC) but it has been several years. The dashboard was crisp, clean, and intuitive, but the tool had a significant overhead. However, no competitor made a tool that met our needs at the time. I have also used Idera's SQL Diagnostic Manager in more than one company. That tool is helpful for a larger environment than we currently have. But I think it is better at alerting than DPA but worse at just about everything else. The good thing is you can flag an alert as acknowledged, so you stop getting emails. The bad thing is I don't think I could use it to troubleshoot issues like I do with DPA. I do not have enough experience to provide helpful feedback on the others selected.

Incentivized

• Saved us (time & money) from developing our own monitoring utilities that would pale in comparison
• Alerts allow us to remedy issues before our customers even know about them
• Tracking resource usage over time allows us to better plan for future needs, before it becomes a pain-point.

Incentivized

• Paid for itself in days. We had a stored procedure that could not meet its SLA, DPA highlighted the issue and contributed to the resolution.
• We had a stored procedure that we were able to calculate as running in 9 milliseconds, unfortunately, we had transactions coming in 7 milliseconds, resulting in duplicate transactions, indicating that a mutex function was needed.

Incentivized