SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Reviews and Ratings

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our e-commerce platform = crown jewels (i.e. all revenue flows in via website). Knowing the in/outs of DB performance is a business requirement.

DPA is a *tremendous* tool. It provides a deep dive across all critical metrics on our ORA RDS & EC2. I find the table/query advisories to be of great use.

Would deploy across any DB if I could - the info is gold.

Likelihood to Recommend

DPA would be useful in QA if one could run load simulations against the site/DB. Probably not viable for a lot of companies - though the cost per instance is peanuts.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Spitfire deploys a software platform backed by a Microsoft SQL Database with over 140 tables and more than 650 procedures. The size of the database typically surpasses millions of records and several hundred GB. SQL creates query plans that differ for each client depending upon their unique distribution of data. Some have only a few dozen projects a year - others a couple of thousand. Clients create budgets with different levels of detail and then create material purchases - sometimes one line each, others 500 lines. So a one-size-fits-all query is a challenge. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer gives us real-time, ongoing visibility into the performance of our queries across a real-world deployment.

Likelihood to Recommend

This is an easy 10 because I actually have recommended this product to multiple clients and colleagues! Any shop that writes its own SQL queries will benefit from the insight provided by SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer, so they know which of their queries is causing a bottleneck. Small shops or databases with only a few tables likely will see far fewer opportunities for optimization.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is our primary monitoring and analysis tool for our SQL server instances. We leverage it for both production and non-production environments. It gives us visibility into system and query performance, alerts us to issues so they can be remediated, and allows us to dig into performance trends of queries and look for key opportunities to make our systems more performant. It is used both by our DBAs and our development team.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The tools you decide to use in your environment are only as good as the effort put in to make it a valuable asset to your organization. We run a Computer Aided Dispatch application that looks like a wagon wheel with interfaces. The application interfaces communicate to a database instance running in a cluster. Database Performance Analyzer has allowed our organization to fine-tune the database to the extent that we now know exactly when the database may be experiencing issues. The issues before used to be queries and users (machines). The database is running so efficiently now, we drill down to the machine that is causing the issue. It is generally a user that has kicked off a query that they should be running against the reporting server, not the live database. DPA is an amazing tool. I have a dashboard of off the "current" 10-minute slice in time. I can tell by a visual look if something is not right.

Likelihood to Recommend

Database Performance Analyzer is a great fit for any database big or small. We also use it to monitor our GIS Database which is only accessed by a single user at this time. The tools assist in providing efficiency recommendations. When anyone uses a database, performance always seems to be an issue. DPA allows you to monitor systems, providing information to database administrators on how they can better manage the database. There are so many aspects to managing a database, it is really nice to have a tool that displays those granular issues that could never be solved without visibility into how the applications are interacting with the database.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer has been a crucial part of maintaining uptime on our databases. It helped find many issues, current or historical, on our databases. The main use case for getting SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer in the first place was to find out why we were having application problems and remove the black box state of our databases. Except for this, SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer has proven useful in other areas as well such as the overall maintenance and performance analyzing of our databases.

Likelihood to Recommend

Currently, we use mostly use SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer for:

<ul><li>Database alerts</li><li>Quick Analysis of performance for both the database and the server hardware</li><li>Root cause analysis of historic issues</li><li>Suggestions on improving the databases</li></ul>

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) is used by our organization for monitoring our Oracle and SQL Server Databases. It is a complete Database monitoring and performance management tool used by our Database Team for optimizing Database performance and fine-tuning. It identifies bottlenecks and root causes for any issues related to the database. It has inbuilt anomaly detection for proactive monitoring (machine learning). It helps identify issues related to Storage IO, provides Query and Table Advisors for fine-tuning database queries, resources being used by the databases (CPU, Memory, Disk, ASM, etc.)

Likelihood to Recommend

It helps identify underlying issues with the database, related to database performance, slow response, and long-running queries. It pinpoints application-related issues due to database performance. It is cross-platform and can support Oracle, SQL Server, and other database platforms on Windows, Red Hat, and Solaris.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Solarwinds Database Performance Analyzer for few of our customers to help in monitoring their Database Environment which includes Microsoft SQL, Postgre SQL, Oracle etc. Solarwinds DPA is primarily used by Database Administrators, Application Engineers (Read Only) and Tools Administrators. There are few interaction with Key Management stakeholders for data analysis but its relatively less.

Likelihood to Recommend

Solarwinds Database Performance Analyzer is well suited in below Scenarios -

1. End to End Database Instance Monitoring.

2. Database in Clusters Monitoring such as Availability Group in MS SQL, CDB in Oracle etc

3. If you want detailed monitoring with historical analysis.

4. SQL Statement Deep Dive Analysis for WAIT Time reason, Blockers, Deadlocks etc

Solarwinds DPA is not well suited if you are looking for Detailed VM, OS monitoring where Database is installed.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is being used mostly by the development team as a self service gateway to view the database transactions that they don't have physical access to. This allows the database team to not have to take time out of their day to perform query analysis, etc..

Likelihood to Recommend

It's well suited as a self help tool. It really saves time on our team so we don't have to provide guidance on issues or questions.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is used by the whole department, mainly for addressing performance issues; deadlocks; growth of database; DB reports; server reports; CPU, memory, and disk health; and their storage.

We're also setting up alerts as per the requirement.

Likelihood to Recommend

If your operation is data driven, then you need to improve performance where SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer helps. It is helpful if you have a big environment where your databases are dependent on timely fixes. It can also be used for resolving application deadlocks and the health of the database--also setting up alerts and adding more custom graphs.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

[SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is] used to monitor the performance on mission critical application databases, both bespoke and packaged applications. For bespoke applications, it is used to ensure that the code developed by our technology partners meets or exceeds the defined SLAs, as well as to alert of problems before they become critical issues. For packaged applications, it has been used to extract detailed information on performance issues, such that we were able to log extremely detailed issues with the vendors, such that they have all of the information needed to correct the underlying issue. For example, we were able to extract the run time of stored procedures, including all of the SQL statements executed, such that the vendor was able to pinpoint the issue rapidly and provide a resolution.

Likelihood to Recommend

Very appropriate for use in performance testing

Very appropriate for alerting to performance issues before they become critical

Can be challenging when monitoring an Oracle active-active RAC database, as each instance is effectively a separate database.