SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Reviews & Insights

Score5.5 out of 10

229 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

User-Friendly Interface: Users appreciate the SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer for its straightforward and easy-to-understand interface. They find it intuitive and user-friendly, even for new users with minimal training.

Real-Time Analysis and Support: The tool's real-time analysis capabilities and support services are highly valued by users. They mention that it helps them promptly identify and resolve performance issues in SQL databases, such as errors, long-running queries, or system-blocking problems.

Wide Range of Supported Databases: Users find the extensive range of supported databases to be a valuable feature of the tool. It allows them to monitor and analyze the performance of multiple databases from one centralized interface.

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Reviews

32 Reviews

Enterprises (1,001+ employees)

Best Database Performance Tool

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 26, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to monitor and performance-tune some of our in-house developed applications. Some of these applications are tier-one applications.

Pros

Track historical performance.
Isolate the issue by providing a specific area of query impacting performance.
Can track which user is causing the issue.
Provides quick indexes where it makes sense.

Cons

Auto tuning - It doesn't have the ability to implement the changes like Oracle Enterprise Manager.
DPA free version is good but fully functional version should be allowed free for a limited number of instances to give users the ability to try functions without a need to make a purchase.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is very appropriate in an environment where you have programmers making changes to an application. It may not work much for a canned application where the performance is already tuned.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (Environmental Services company, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

SolarWinds at a large bank as seen from an Engineer

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 30, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Within our organisation, we use SolarWinds to monitor the most important applications. We give permissions to our customers to view their own data. DPA is saving us on logging in on servers and telling the customer to modify their application (they can see it themselves and fix it themselves). Also it gives us background information on the Virtualization layer and their isseus. It is really helpfull as a first responder to a customer with performance questions.

Pros

monitor databases
monitor servers
monitor on virtualisation isseus.

Cons

adding permissions for users or domain groups
adding boxes is not easy
being able to remove servers after x month (automagically or via an API)

Likelihood to Recommend

DPA is well suited in larger environments. In a MSP model it is not very usable because of all the open ports needed. The culprit of agentless operation.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (Banking company, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

SolarWinds DPA review

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 23, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used as our central database monitoring tool across the whole organization, used especially to improve query performance, resolve blocks and to analyze trends.

Pros

Deep queries analyses, provides good advice for performance improvements.
Allows us to create our own custom alerts and reports.
Has a very intuitive and well-explained interface. It is split up for different objectives to analyse or monitor as trends, tunning, current activities and resources.

Cons

None identified

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer offers great query analysis relying on different monitoring categories like trends, current activities, resources and tuning.

Muraru Adrian-Cezar

Senior MSSQL Database Administrator in Information Technology at Basware (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

DPA -- The Wait stats king

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 20, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

DPA is a great tool if you are looking for a performance monitoring solution for your database servers. It's intuitive to use, and it can be used to pinpoint the root cause of a performance issue -- both during and after the event. It can highlight the specific statement within a stored procedure that is causing a performance issue, and capture the query plan to allow detailed analysis of the issue. It captures various useful performance counters, and you can add your own custom metrics, but it's the wait analysis where this tool really shines.

Pros

The best tool for wait analysis.
A simple, intuitive web interface.
A quality product that is improving over time.

Cons

The wait analysis at the statement level has it's pros/cons. I would like to see higher level stored procedure.
It's a good performance monitoring tool, but not good for monitoring health -- backups, log shipping etc.
The query plan viewer in the web is only good for simple query plans. It's easy to download the plan to view in SSMS, Plan Explorer, etc. though.

Likelihood to Recommend

DPA is very useful as a performance monitoring tool for your database servers. If you want a tool to monitor your waits, this is the best tool for the job. Dynamic SQL can be an issue for DPA if you are generating a lot of unique statements, as DPA works at the statement level. Working at the statement level can be a good thing, but a performance issue can sometimes be diluted at this level.
DPA is a performance monitoring tool, and it's good at this task. It doesn't monitor things like backups, log shipping, etc.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (Computer Software company, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

June 11, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use this product across the whole organization for multiple applications.

Pros

Easy to use.
Flexible.
A good tool to analyze DB performance.

Cons

Needs a more alert setup
Needs 24/7 support.

Likelihood to Recommend

I feel that SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer makes it easy to identify DB issues and helps us to resolve performance problems proactively. We implemented SolarWinds DPA on more than 450 servers in the last year, but sometimes we are facing an issue with data collection. Also, there is no 24/7 support, so it's very hard to reach the support team during the US night time.

Arun M

Senior Database Administrator in Engineering at NASDAQ (Financial Services, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

My DPA-review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 7, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am the only user of the department that uses SolarWids Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) almost every day. I use DPA for monitoring a single Oracle production database, and gets alerts when it does not perform or when it's unavailable to the users. The monitoring also pinpoints which SQL statements needs tuning, which I can correct before the problems get serious.

DPA makes it possible for me to be proactive. I find the DPA-GUI to be very user-friendly and easy to understand even without reading the manual.

Pros

SQL-tuning advice. It's easy to locate the most inefficient SQL-staements as they are all graded. You just click and drill-down to see both the SQL-statements and statistics. That info will most likely give you enough knowledge to solve the issue, for example by adding an extra index.
The monitoring of the database by setting up your own alerts in all kind of categories. For example, alerts when tablespaces are running full or when disk/CPU load are too high or if the server becomes unavailable.
The possibilty to browse the repository and see trends. You can see exactly when problems are starting and see if the changes you make has an effect in the time to come.

Cons

The license-management seems difficult to use, and I always find that I need to contact SolarWinds when upgrading server, etc.

Likelihood to Recommend

DPA pinpoints quite well which SQLs could need tuning, and it shows which impact the bad SQL had on the database and which impact the correction has afterwards. The repository collects more and more knowledge of your database as times goes by which enables you to see trends over time. You can very easy customize all kinds of alerts and get alerted (for example, by email) if something serious happens with your database.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (Hospital & Health Care company, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Network Sherlock Holmes

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 20, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use SolarWinds to monitor our ERP and other application's database health and load. It helps us fine-tune the performance issues.

Pros

Detailed minute by minute performance data.
It gives a detailed performance insight at the server and application-level.
Analytics and problem alerting.

Cons

None that I can think of at the moment. It has what I expected out of a monitoring tool.

Likelihood to Recommend

For applications team, it is best suited for identifying locking transactions and badly written queries.

Verified User

Executive in Information Technology (Construction company, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Do you want to know the truth of why something happened (and be able to prove it)?

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 16, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Beyond day-to-day monitoring, the DPA (Database Performance Analyzer) is key to anyone who needs to look back in time to provide Trending and/or Root Cause Analysis, whether database related or not. There are suspects and culprits, and this product can help to identify them. DPA is very, very detailed, and you can zero in on an issue, all the way down to a minute timeframe if you are willing to do the cross analysis work. This product is A+ and can be used for Oracle, MySQL, and SQL Server.

Pros

Problem categorization.
Problem identification.
Serious trending analysis.

Cons

When presenting possible sources of issues, it may be better to first give a list overview, and then proceed to drill down into the details.

Likelihood to Recommend

Suited to root cause analysis (but you also have to do your cross-analysis).

Steve Shandro

Director, Global Database Administration in Information Technology at Carlson Wagonlit Travel (Information Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

DPA is a helpful monitoring and analytical tool

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 15, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer to predict the behavior of our campaigns and e-marketing. With SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer, we can check the performance of our databases and how the behavior will be during high load works in the season and spikes that are associated with our day by day jobs.

Pros

Predict performance across all databases
Predict unexpected behavior
Make a correct forecast about how much memory and CPU could be needed for a particular job

Cons

The agent usually consumes a lot of memory
High cost, since it is charged per instance.
An efficient and intelligent search feature would be helpful.

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is a really good software for monitoring purposes. If your company is e-marketing related, this is a good tool since you can see the overall trends and issues that cause a significant effect on performance when campaigns are being sent. But it is not good enough for deep dives into specific issues related to Database.

Ariel Portocarrero

Global Monitoring Manager in Engineering at Cheetah Digital (Computer Software, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

SolarWind's products make IT infrastructures work better

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 9, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Monitoring databases is always a critical topic for a database administrator, but SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer made is easy with real-time monitoring for DB status using query's hash, CPU time, programs, database query plans. Users, as well there other machines for correlation DB integration in multiple databases, query analyzer helps to display the historical graphs for understanding the behavior and provide reports complete for first glance understanding of abnormal or normal statuses.

Pros

Multiple database real-time performance/status in single windows with an easy illustration using graphs.
Query analyzer and identify plan text.
Overall database status monitoring and reporting.

Cons

Plan hash and plan adviser.
DB color and grouping for interdependent query's relation.
Point the users and identify single users for multiple DB Access Scenarios.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited for database real-time status and performance monitoring and reporting, an easy illustration of a query in graphs for user understanding, interdependency and query identification and a single glass view for multiple different databases.

Not as good for failed jobs status for a database, identifying a single user while it's using multiple database correlations or logging into multiple databases. The Adviser plan and suggestions are not always helpful to the administrator in relation to the alerts or abnormal behavior.

Mohit Tiwari

Network Security Consultant in Professional Services at Fujitsu Network Communications (Telecommunications, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile