DBArtisan vs. IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server

DBArtisan is excellent for large institutions with multiple mission-critical databases. It works especially well for cross-platforms RDBMS support. I am mostly familiar with Oracle, but less familiar with SQL Server and Sybase. So I certainly appreciate having a similar interface that allows me to manage those less familiar RDBMS, as this will mean a smaller learning curve. DBArtisan is mostly for DBAs, it is not suitable for developers, I believe the vendor has a separate tool for that

Incentivized

If you have several SQL servers and don't have a lot of time or resources to constantly monitor them, SQLdm will be very helpful. For one or two servers, it might be overkill. All of our servers are virtual, so having a tool that can monitor host metrics as well as guest metrics is a plus as well.

Incentivized

• The free trial offer was great for me to test the software before purchasing it.
• It monitors queries well and shows resource allocation, as well as detailed stats for each running query.

Incentivized

• SQL Server Monitoring
• Alerts
• Diagnostics

Incentivized

• DBArtisan lacks a utility that does schema or object comparisons, which is a feature in Toad. I find this useful in some situations where I need to find out all differences between Prod and QA for a given schema, for example. DBArtisan doesn't seem to have the capacity to do this.
• I wish there was a way for the tool to warn me before performing a long-running task. For example if I want to re-organize a large table or rebuild an index for a table with millions of rows, it should warn me before executing it, so that I may choose to do it in a different way. Sometimes if I let these long operations run for too long, it freezes the program and crashes DBArtisan. I would rather run it on the DB server, and run it in background so that it doesn't time out, if DBArtisan gave me a warning before execution.
• Idera has taken over Embarcadero. I never heard of or dealt with Idera for support. I don't know if they have same the quality support as before.

Incentivized

• While there is reporting present in the app, I don't find it to be very configurable. I eventually pointed our reporting software at the SQLdm database so I could craft my own reporting. The reporting that's there is sufficient for a lot of things, but for more detailed analysis and trending, it's a little light
• The config right out of the box feels a little heavy to me. It leans towards the side of over monitoring and over notifying. For example, I view "critical" alerts as those that I'd want to be woken up at 3am for. After a fresh install, I felt like I was getting so many "critical" alerts that I was starting to ignore them. I had to spend a good bit of time tweaking.
• Sometimes the interface seems laggy. Switching between individual servers and switching screens can take what feels like a long time. I'm not sure if it's the way I have the client configured or something up with my machine, but this app in particular feels slower than it should.

Incentivized

I have never tried their support so the number above is meaningless

Incentivized

DBArtisan does not have an in-depth performance analyzer for databases.

Incentivized

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL, Redgate SQL, and MonitorLogicMonitor are similar products to each other. We decided on IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL because our experience with locating heavy queries has been very good and it provides real-time monitoring of all servers and databases. It also allows you to have a large volume of historical data which allows you to analyze trends in the databases.

Incentivized

• While it is expensive, it saves us a great deal of time in getting a lot of DB work done.
• The front end is reasonably powerful and significantly more polished than any of the free alternatives

Incentivized

• Quickly identify issues around deadlocks and blocking. Quickly allowing for resolution
• Quickly and easily enable automation around issues so we can reduce the amount of time it takes for resolution of issues
• Having built-in tools to view things such as index fragmentation--allows you to quickly find correlations in performance issues

Incentivized