Spotlight vs. SQL Server Business Intelligence Manager

Spotlight is great when you need a tool to give a quick look at a SQL server as a whole. It gives you the ability to see a lot of things, which can be vital in diagnosing problems or identifying stressors. Less great is the open-end of some of the diagnoses it makes, and things it identifies as "problems" (unless you love users coming to you and saying something like "Spotlight says there's a problem with our page latch!!!").

Incentivized

BIDS works well if you're committed to using all MS products. It does take some serious consideration if you know you will end up working outside of that, such as working with AWS products.

Incentivized

• The screen is color-coded, so when Red or Orange is displayed you are able to drill down into that setting and figure out what is going on.
• This tool also integrates with the OEM agents which will also have implemented.
• Spotlight also works great without RAC databases, able to view at the cluster level or drill down to instances and VM's.

Incentivized

• Shows an excellent dashboard
• Allows easy monitoring of multiple instances
• Created an environment that can be self healing

Incentivized

• Cash Flow analysis could be better, there are many different scenarios to calculate the cash flow but flexibility is not great.
• Incorporating machine learning algorithms for predictive analytics could enhance forecasting accuracy

Incentivized

• Training is needed to understand and use all the feature
• Works well only with Microsoft products
• Not enough Tutorials available
• Features are more useful for larger organization

Incentivized

the platform offers a clean, easy to use interface. You can customize reports and dashboard. Integration is also pretty good, you can integrate to Xero, QBO and MYOB and excel spreadsheets. It also offers very broad supporting documents and webinars. There are only two downside of Spotlight; learning curve (it could be a bit difficult at the beginning to learn the system) and price point (For small businesses, Spotlight Reporting can be seen as relatively expensive compared to other reporting tools)

Incentivized

Though our support needs have been minimal, we have gotten good responses when we have needed it.

Incentivized

Spotlight is more usable, better at meeting requirements. Integration with Xero is one of the strengths (as others integrate too but Spotlight seems better connection). We also like the way group consolidation work in Spotlight. If your focus is on comprehensive, flexible, and visually rich reports and dashboards for multiple clients or entities, Spotlight is a clear choice.

Incentivized

SQL Server [Business Intelligence] Manager works well with Microsoft products. It has several advanced features along with dashboards and alerts that can be configured to user's need.

Incentivized

• It had a positive impact in two main areas. First, it was easy for the DBA team to configure it to watch and alert on the most important instances. And second, it was very easy to provide clients read-only access to the dashboard so they could watch their servers as well, i.e. they weren't always pestering us for current status.

Incentivized

• We've prevented several SSAS outages because of SQL Server Business Intelligence Manager's timely alerts.
• We've greatly reduced cubes calculation times with SQL Server Business Intelligence Manager's tuning features.

Incentivized