Amazon RDS Performance Insights vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

When you need to monitor your database at low level metrics such as query load or CPU usage at some point in time. You can also use it to understand which component is a heavy load on your DB. It is a great tool for routine monitoring of your DB and to help plan for capacity. I would not use it as an exclusive source for scaling your DB though since the is not long-term or very granular data to be able to run a thorough analysis on peaks of predictive analysis.

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

• RDS Infrastructure Metrics
• RDS Logical Metrics
• Real time visualization of query load
• Identify Performance Bottlenecks
• Historical Performance Analysis of load

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

• Easier way to identify to which service the query comes from
• Easier way to identify correlation between metrics
• More customization, right now it is too restricted
• The interval could be smaller between data points for peaks of usage

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

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

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

Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a out of the box plug and use solution for AWS with a press of a button, whereas Prometheus would require a lot of configuration and deployment and the learning curve is slower, making it not so user friendly. Datadog on the other hand offers similar capabilities but at a much higher cost. With that in mind, Amazon RDS Performance Insights is the choice to integrate with your AWS services quickly and affordably.

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

• Help Optimize Query and app performance
• Help better plan capacity for the DB
• Improved the company capacity on troubleshooting problems in DBs

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