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SolarWinds SQL Sentry Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 9 out of 10
Score
9 out of 10

Reviews

102 Reviews

Sentry One - the good and the bad

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

To alert us of any issues with our SQL Server estate and to identify bottlenecks such as slow running queries so we can tune them for improved performance.

Pros

  • Alerting of critical issues
  • Identify slow running queries
  • Emailing when a SQL Server is down

Cons

  • The client version is tightly bound to the server version so all have to be upgraded at the same time.
  • The client is quite slow at times
  • The windows metrics is hard to get working

Likelihood to Recommend

Production SQL Server implementations

VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
10 years of experience

[SolarWinds SQL Sentry] in a Nutshell

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We've purchased SolarWinds SQL Sentry in order to have eyes inside our database servers. From the moment that we rolled it out, people were excited to use it and couldn't believe that such a tool exists [that] can provide so many details on the queries and performance inside the server. It has helped us to discover performance issues, bugs, and much more.

Pros

  • Jobs management
  • Locking investigation
  • Performance analyze
  • Monitoring of AlwaysON

Cons

  • Creating smoother integration to 3rd part tools, such as Slack, PagerDuty, etc.
  • Adding the ability to have an option for adding custom metrics defined by user queries
  • Adding more dashboards and visibility into the SQL Sentry Portal

Likelihood to Recommend

[SolarWinds] SQL Sentry is well suited for any production SQL Server that has performance issues or a need to look into the guts of the server itself. Using the very specific features that are targeting SQL Server, you can see that every feature you use was described by the hands of a DBA and it is suited to be used by one. It is not suitable to be used with other database technologies at the moment.

VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
1 year of experience

SolarWinds SQL Sentry to monitor, identify the blocker, and fix the problem in no time

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It helps to monitor SQL server performance monitoring with the help of graphs. ]The software] helps to identify the performance problems like long running quries on the database. [It] helps you to create best index for the given query. Daily running queries on [the] database can be easily viewed and its wait time can also be monitored.

Pros

  • Query analysis
  • More ways to monitor database performance
  • Graphical representation of different factors

Cons

  • Customized dashboards are good, but can be improved further.
  • More details can be shown to optimize query plan.
  • CPU and memory usage , availability can be shown in more different ways with additional details.

Likelihood to Recommend

[SolarWinds] SQL Sentry is well suited in [the] following cases: Nodes, availability, monitoring, query optimization, identification of problems, and increasing overall database performance. With the help of dashboards and graphs one can easily check all the important factors in one go. Network performance monitoring can be done easily. Databases can be monitored on AWS with the help of SentryOne.

VU
Verified User
Contributor in Engineering (201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
1 year of experience

SQL Sentry is a must if you have Microsoft SQL databases

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The dashboard view of our server allows us to monitor the activity on our primary system and at a glance know if there is an issue. Getting to travel back in time and isolate performance issues is a huge bonus for us. We have been able to optimize and reduce issues with our database allowing our users to have a better experience with the dependent software. We also use it to monitor and plan our ETL jobs to not interfere with each other. In our regional community, we recommend others to SQL Sentry to monitor their Microsoft SQL instances.

Pros

  • Real-Time Monitoring
  • Top Long Running SQL
  • Performance troubleshooting
  • Job Monitoring/Planning
  • Procedure and Query Statistics
  • Shiny Easy to use interface for those not comfortable with writing Queries

Cons

  • Integration with Azure Data Studio
  • A Containerized, platform agnostic web client
  • Support for Other Operating Systems
  • Support for other databases

Likelihood to Recommend

Just had an end-user approach me about a long-running report. I was able to utilize the Top SQL tab and view the long-running report, copy the SQL being executed so I can place it in a notebook for later review for performance optimization. My manager looked in on the DBA Space earlier this morning to inquire about login issues for an application. As we had the dashboard loaded on our primary monitor, we were able to quickly glance and identify that the issue was not with the database. The issue was with a specific web server that was identified with other tools. We received a lot of calls in a short period of time with reports of 504 issues in the application. Using the Top SQL tab, identified that there was a report query being run multiple times that was causing table locks to not release. All these issues were identified in seconds with SentyOne. Most were resolved in under 60 seconds from the initial report of concern.

VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
2 years of experience

Great performance tool for the experienced DBA

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization is using SQL Sentry to monitor a group of high-profile SQL Servers for performance problems. The DBA team relies on this tool to quickly resolve performance issues -- sometimes before the users even notice something is wrong. It also helps with long-term capacity planning by giving us historical trends of many useful metrics.

Pros

  • The performance dashboards are very useful and help bring attention directly to the problem areas.
  • The alerting system is extremely customizable,, so you don't get peppered with a bunch of useless alerts that make you blind to real action-worthy alerts.
  • The reporting is powerful enough to provide exactly what you need to see trends over time.

Cons

  • The alert customization is powerful, but can be cumbersome to set up.
  • There is so much information on the screen at any given time that without some practice it can be overwhelming.

Likelihood to Recommend

This solution is perfect for a team with a large server count and, at least, moderate experience supporting a SQL Server environment. If the environment is smaller or the team has less experience working with SQL Server performance tuning methodologies, then the tool may be overwhelming for the users.

VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
1 year of experience

While expensive SQL Sentry is the most complete proactive monitoring and reactive troubleshooting tool I've used for SQL Server

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I manage the department that is responsible for all of the company's databases. We use SolarWinds SQL Sentry for monitoring our SQL servers proactively as well as reactive troubleshooting.

Pros

  • The Top SQL functionality has been extremely useful for identifying poorly performing queries by resource consumption.
  • The flexibility of creating your own Advisory Conditions has allowed us to integrate our custom internal alerts into a centralized dashboard and alerting platform.
  • Being able to highlight any chart on the dashboard and then tool-matching that window across all the other charts makes it much easier to correlate the different performance metrics against each other.

Cons

  • While creating Advisory Conditions is extremely flexible it can be a bit challenging to get everything correct. Some sort of interactive tutorial would be really helpful.
  • The alert messages are very detailed, but it takes a bit to learn how to parse them. Some sort of enriched HTML format would be a nice quality of life improvement.
  • There are half a million configurable options in multiple places. Some sort of search feature would be fantastic.

Likelihood to Recommend

Of all the tools I've used, SolarWinds SQL Sentry's Top Query has been the single most helpful tool in helping me identify which queries are putting a load on our servers and at what times. This greatly simplifies my job in prioritizing tuning. Having Plan Explorer directly linked to the tool is icing on the cake.

AG
Andrew Gould
Manager of Data Services in Information Technology at Integrated DNA Technologies (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
View profile

Sentry One a comprehensive monitoring tool

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Sentry one is used to profile anomalies in the SQL Server like blockings, deadlocks and high CPU usage.

Pros

  • Problem detection
  • Alerts
  • Graphs

Cons

  • High resource usage
  • Calendar take time to load
  • incomplete execution plan

Likelihood to Recommend

[Well suited to] Show top running queries and details like CPU usage and start time.

PB
Prashant BHolane
Software Engineer in Information Technology at Prime TSR (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
1 year of experience

Great Performance Monitoring Tool

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have used SQL Sentry primarily for helping us monitor and proactively deal with performance issues with SQL Server. When we have a performance problem this tool has been quite helpful at reviewing past history and allow us to see patterns that may be causing us issues and helps us identify areas we can make changes to improve performance.

Pros

  • Performance tuning.
  • Monitoring.
  • History tracking.

Cons

  • User interface could use some improvement.
  • Make it easier to drill down.
  • Add ability to set up more alerting.

Likelihood to Recommend

I feel this tool is ideally suited for monitoring performance issues in an OLTP environment maybe not so much for DW applications.

VU
Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
3 years of experience

Already impressed with SQL Sentry

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using SQL Sentry to centralize our SQL server monitoring from a number of differing domains. For the first time at this organization, we are getting a comprehensive view of our entire SQL estate. The previous solution was a mix of individual alerts on various SQL instances and several instances of a competing monitoring tool.

Pros

  • Metrics collection
  • Collects data across differing domains
  • SQL Plan Explorer is part of the tool
  • Alert configuration is amazing
  • Customer support is outstanding

Cons

  • No metrics for replication, but does alert
  • Thick client is slow and almost unusable over a VPN
  • The alert configuration is so flexible that it has a steep learning curve

Likelihood to Recommend

SQL Sentry is so flexible it's amazing. It comes with a steep learning curve and will take time to truly implement and dial in, but you're not alone--customer support is outstanding. My biggest complaint is that the thick client is slow and almost unusable over a VPN. Since COVID hit, that's a big deal. The web portal is snappy and fast, and I look forward to when the thick client is retired in favor of the portal.

VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review

SQL Sentry Review

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SQL Sentry to monitor and alert on our SQL Server Environment. It helps us troubleshoot live issues as they occur using the dashboard and Top SQL. The history allows us to look back and investigate issues that have already happened. The built in baselines help us compare current metrics with historical norms. The dashboard gives us the a great view to analyze CPU, waits, disk latency and many other metrics on a single screen. There are some good out of the box reports. It is a powerful and flexible tool.

Pros

  • The performance dashboard makes it easy to get a quick overview of the current state of the DB server.
  • All monitoring tools have overhead. SQL Sentry does a good job of making the data collection as efficient as possible. I have seen performance issues with another 3rd party monitoring tool. I have not seen any with SQL Sentry.
  • Highlighting a significant period on the dashboard (like high CPU, large waits etc) and jumping to Top SQL is very handy.

Cons

  • There is a bit of a learning curve when setting up advisory conditions (ie alerts on specific metrics).
  • The Top SQL tab does a great job at big resource hogs. However the small, frequently executed queries are not as easy to analyze with this tool.

Likelihood to Recommend

SQL Sentry allows the user to get a quick overview of the DB server and then drill into problem areas to get more details. The dashboard charts make it easy to snip and paste into Teams chats for the group to analyze. It seamlessly integrates with Plan Explorer for detailed analysis of the execution plan.

VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
SolarWinds SQL Sentry
1 year of experience