Goliath Performance Monitor is an IT infrastructure monitoring platform from Goliath Technologies in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.
N/A
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer
Score 5.5 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) enables deep visibility into database performance and expert advice for performance optimization and tuning. What can you monitor with DPA? Oracle Oracle Exadata Oracle EBS Microsoft SQL Server Azure SQL Database Azure SQL Database Managed Instance MySQL DB2 SAP ASE Aurora MariaDB DPA monitors physical, virtual,…
GPM is well suited to environments where there is a high volume of Citrix traffic coupled with a lot of different hardware infrastructure endpoints. Large scale multi-user operations where performance issue detection and resolution are key are the primary areas where GPM excels. Use of the GPM product is less appropriate when trying to monitor response times in a JVM application environment.
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.
GPM does exceptionally well at gathering and presenting deep metrics from our Citrix servers and storing them in the GPM database server. This is a vital strength for any system monitoring tool and allows administrators to address almost any system related performance question.
The MonitorIT front end console does a great job of providing graphical views the summarize data from a multitude of locations. This is particularly important in that it allows administrators to focus in on the reasons for performance issues in a proactive manner before hearing from the end users, especially given the large volumes of detailed data captured by the system
The MonitorIT product is also very adept at gathering metrics across the processing continuum, providing metrics for system resources, service availability and end-to-end user activity. This is a great strength of the system and allows us to develop Tableau visualizations in addition to the extensive reports and dashboarding capabilities of the GPM product.
From a purely personal level I would like to see MonitorIT be able to consume data from our clinical/operational databases instead of relying only on taking data in via the agent, log files and scripted sysoutput.
I think some improvements are possible in the area of custom monitoring of file systems, especially for the detection of missing file scenarios and file volume/rates. GPM only monitors traditional file system metrics like I/O, availability and space utilization, but custom scripting is possible within the design of the system.
Improvements in documenting the data model of the GPM database schema would also be very useful to advanced users of the system especially when additional external reporting tools are used to extend the GPM usefulness
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
We eventually settled on GPM because of its very obvious strength and depth with Citrix monitoring. Our entire clinical system is deployed over a Citrix infrastructure so it was essential to choose a system whose key focus was Citrix monitoring. GPM's functionality is unrivaled when it comes to Citrix monitoring which is immediately apparent when one witnesses the deep internals of the Citrix platform being collected and reported on, in close to real-time.
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.
GPM has had a decent positive ROI particularly in terms of identifying systemic issues and prevention of system downtimes or resource depletion etc. The GPM product shines a spotlight on configuration and design flaws and as a result makes the systems more stable and responsive, saving us time and effort in diagnosing and reporting on system problems. unfortunately these are quite intangible but nevertheless invaluable business objectives for us, but we can say that downtimes and slowness events have dropped consistently year on year since we deployed GPM.
Our overall objectives with the GPM project was to deploy a system that could be deployed centrally in our Corp datacenter while monitoring devices and users out in the facilities across the East, Central and West geographic regions. The cost of the endpoint agents was quite modest and provided great functionality at this price point. In this respect our business objectives are well satisfied and the system has been a complete success.
An important aspect of our business objective was to have a monitoring system that didn't require constant maintenance and babysitting, and as such the GPM system has worked out fantastically in that we only use 1-2 staff resources to monitor all the systems mentioned earlier in this review.
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.
