SolarWinds SQL Sentry vs. SQL Server Business Intelligence Manager

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.

Incentivized

BIDS works well if you're committed to using all MS products. It does take some serious consideration if you know you will end up working outside of that, such as working with AWS products.

Incentivized

• Alerting is very flexible and configurable to our needs
• Linking alerting into third party alerting tools via PowerShell was easy
• Collecting and rolling up SQL statements make it much easier to troubleshoot performance problems
• Drilling into PLE and what’s happening when it drops out
• Ease of drilling into time-frame to figure out what was the issue at that time
• Being able to query the SentryOne database for management reports is awesome (Deadlocks and Blocking)

• Shows an excellent dashboard
• Allows easy monitoring of multiple instances
• Created an environment that can be self healing

Incentivized

• It would be nice if the reports can be interactive like drill down, clickable content, etc.
• Navigation could improve and become more intuitive.
• Calendar of events could also improve - wish the date and time range could be specified instead of just by day or interval.

Incentivized

• Training is needed to understand and use all the feature
• Works well only with Microsoft products
• Not enough Tutorials available
• Features are more useful for larger organization

Incentivized

Absolutely. SQL Sentry is an absolute must have for any company with a SQL Server estate. It provides a force multiplier to effectively manage SQL Server, and the feature sets are second to none. The support and expertise at SentryOne is incredible. They are very supportive of both the platform users and helping your business with the product

Incentivized

I don't know how we survived before without this tool, the added value that you get from it to do deep dive performance analysis, reactive problem solving and proactive monitoring and alerting is limitless. We have only scratched the surface of what we can do with this tool at my company. The support and ROI that SentryOne provide is exceptional and one of my favourite vendors to deal with.

Incentivized

The system is working perfectly in capturing data, but we do experience issues with SQL Timeout when viewing results in the remote clients. This may be due to the fact that our monitoring service is consuming most of the CPU, and it is the same server that is hosting the SQL Repository. We could probably fix the issue by separating the SQL instance from the monitoring service.

Incentivized

In most cases the pages load very quickly. In our particular case, we need to do some movement of services to separate our monitoring service to separate infrastructure from the repository. When we first started with SQL Sentry on 5 licenses, we did not have any issues. Since we have now grown that to 25, we are experiencing some challenges. We do not believe this to be a tool problem

Incentivized

The main platform is very well supported. Requests for help with customizing alerts and monitors have been rapidly and thoroughly responded to. Our use of the chain feature seems to be out of the ordinary and our defect reports there while understood and taken seriously, tend to be lower priority than defects in the main platform. They will work diligently to give us a workaround but correction in the standard release is a little slower in the chain feature.

Incentivized

sql sentry expert came onsight to review the performance of installation and gave us a good insight to using the tool

Incentivized

Was suggested that we install the process monitors on a dev or qa database server, but we found it more useful to create an IT db server and put it there (along with a few other apps that we use for monitoring).

Incentivized

SQL Sentry has a LOT more information in it than the SolarWinds DPA product. Its reporting tool isn't as good either. The IDERA product isn't as reliable as SQL Sentry and its reporting isn't nearly as good. The IDERA UI is a resource hog and isn't as intuitive.

Incentivized

SQL Server [Business Intelligence] Manager works well with Microsoft products. It has several advanced features along with dashboards and alerts that can be configured to user's need.

Incentivized

We are running 25 instances through a single monitoring service and it is able to keep up. We are finding that this many instances in our environment is about as many as can be handled. We will need to deploy additional monitoring services. Luckily, there is no additional licensing costs to deploy additional monitoring services. For us, it's just an additional Azure VM.

Incentivized

• Better customer service as it alerts me automatically to loss of service issues so I can react and either get things fixed before it impacts the customers or to let my management know as soon as possible
• It helps me find expensive SQL so our customers get better performance and we make better use of our resources

Incentivized

• We've prevented several SSAS outages because of SQL Server Business Intelligence Manager's timely alerts.
• We've greatly reduced cubes calculation times with SQL Server Business Intelligence Manager's tuning features.

Incentivized