Item: SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Sql Sentry Performance Advisor is a great tool, whether it's looking at the meaningful dashboards or receiving the custom alerts. Being busier nowadays, I rely more on responding to the email alerts such as poorly performing sql jobs.

It is a mainstream product with features extended to cloud reporting/dashboard, therefore catering to a wider audience such as executives or IT managers

We currently only use Performance Advisor for production SQL systems. To further troubleshooting, there have been times requiring the need of SQL Profiler, SQL Sentry's Event Manager, Fragmentation Manager, etc...My wishlist is for it to be an all-encompassing product, to actually give recommendations on making the system better, if faster disks could make a difference, if a missing index was the issue, etc...

All-in-all, I'm satisfied with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor. It makes my job easier with less fire fighting.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Custom alerting: can set different thresholds and different email recipients
Quite scaleable, and speed of the console is not degraded as more systems are monitored; database repository is fairly small for a one month retention of approx. 10 servers. For us it's 1 GB per server. can fluctuate based on your own settings
Custom responses to job thresholds and error return values

Cons

It would be ge great to see more of a "Doctor" or "Advisor" in that the application would give recommendations. You would generally need a good grasp of what could be the problem and what could be the fix-up
Include more functionality into Performance Advisor without having to purchase different modules

Alternatives Considered

SQL Sentry Performance seemed to be more scaleable than others, and flexible enough for pricing because it was module based if you wanted others like Event Manager, SSAS Advisor, etc...

Likelihood to Recommend

To have all your SQL instances monitored can be rather expensive. So, in my opinion, it's ideal to buy PA for only your really critical SQL servers.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings

Comments

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Rick Pittser
(Vendor Representative) commented 10 years ago
Hello, We greatly appreciate you taking the time out of a busy day to rate SQL Sentry, and provide us with some great feedback. The best way to make any product better is to listen to those who use it. We take great pride in trying to find ways to make SQL Sentry the best product possible, so our customers can have even just a little extra time in their day. I did want to take some time to let you know that SQL Sentry has added an Index Analysis feature. This feature is currently available in the integrated version of SQL Sentry’s Plan Explorer, and will soon be available for the stand alone version of Plan Explorer. This feature will analyze and recommend indexes, while also providing a “sandbox” environment for testing different indexes. A very powerful tool for shaving some time off some execution durations. For additional information on this feature, please check out this blog by Aaron Bertrand (http://blogs.sqlsentry.com/aaronbertrand/sql-sentry-v10-index-analysis/ ). In general, SQL Sentry is certainly looking for ways to provide this “doctor” advice you mention. However, this can be tricky given the nearly infinite combinations of hardware/software, settings, and configurations environments have. This makes it very difficult to find recommendations that in general could be helpful or improve performance across the board. That being said, features like these are certainly something we continue to research.

SQL Sentry Performance Advisor - a great monitoring tool for SQL Server