LogicMonitor vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

We have several government departments and universities as our clients, and we conduct online examinations for them. Therefore, our servers require additional security to prevent unauthorized access to our systems remotely without our permission. We were performing an examination for one of our clients when someone from outside attempted to access our systems by creating a backdoor to our servers. Our team was busy handling the examination process and ensuring its smoothness. However, thanks to LogicMonitor, we were alerted at the right time, and we were able to save our data and clients' information with its help.

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

• LogicMonitor is very customizable. We can build whatever modules we need, because it uses standard protocols like HTTPS, SNMP and WMI to gather data and metrics.
• We like that LogicMonitor is an agentless solution for our use case. Not all customers will allow an agent-based approach to 3rd party tools.
• LogicMonitor has thousands of out of the box modules, which work on their own and also act as good baselines for the ones that we will end up customizing more. We are rarely starting at zero when we decide to do something new with LogicMonitor.
• LogicMonitor has great documentation, and support has been helpful in the instances where we've needed them.

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

• Because of the rapid change in technology, maintaining DataSources to the most current level can be time-consuming for staff.
• The network discovery and mapping capabilities are not as robust when compared to other solutions
• While it can back-up configuration files on devices, it does not have the ability to push or modify configuration files back to devices.

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

This product has met virtually all of our needs. It was easy to implement and has been simple to support. Customization has been intuitive with many options available. They keep adding features and expanding available options. The future of LogicMonitor looks even better than it is today which is very promising. The management and support teams at LogicMonitor are always helpful

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

Set up is super easy. Just stand up a small Linux or Windows server to act as a collector. There are no agents to install on monitored devices and all you need is SNMP or WMI access. When creating dashboards, all you have to do is find the widget on the device you want to show up and choose the menu option to add it.

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 sales team support we received was top notch. They worked hand in hand to make sure the product met all expectations. So far we have not really had to work with support that much; we have worked with setup team after purchase to deploy product fully. No issues so far and we are four weeks in.

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

Add good training

Incentivized

The training is good but room to improve

Incentivized

I did not truly dedicate myself to implementing LogicMonitor. However, I overheard the IT team members explain that "LogicMonitor is perfect for us as it has made most of the work automated, and implementation and training sessions were perfect for us." Thus, I can state that everything went smoothly with our implementation.

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

We did not use software like LogicMonitor for the same work before, but I must say that my experience with LogicMonitor has been outstanding so far. It helps me to be free of tension. I can now concentrate on the actual work I was hired to do for my company.

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

• We have been able to eliminate multiple tools through LogicMonitor's ability to use collectors to run scripts and collect any numerical data from any reachable endpoint along with the customization and widgets available for dashboards. This has allowed for reduced costs and consolidation to a single point of view.
• The ability to grant our clients access to see their data in real time has improved both our client satisfaction surveys and attributed to a few point gain in our NPS score. The ease of getting to the data has also reduced the quoting time for our sales teams during renewals to quantify what a client is consuming.
• The amount of data that LogicMonitor collects affords our technicians a wide area of review when trying to isolate an issue and find a root cause. With the standard out of box data that is collected we have often been able to set a new threshold on something not previously thought of to proactively alert us in the future after identifying those root causes. This has reduced our Major Issues from 3-5 per month to usually 1-2 or less per quarter.

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