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

54 Reviews

Product Management

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

Small Teams use of DPA

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 2, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

DPA is being used by the IT and CIM Developers team to monitor our production databases. IT will check the system daily for any signs of issues. Both teams will check when testing or rolling out new systems to ensure the Software is operating as intended. These testing checks are done at least once a week by either department.

Pros

Quickly identifies slow running queries.
Identifies which database is causing issues on a server.
Provides an easy to read way of seeing stats on all servers quickly.

Cons

No way to mark a query activity as normal, for example a slow running SPROC that has to be that way.
Not many options to restrict access.

Likelihood to Recommend

DPA is very useful for finding blockers or slow running queries and provided evidence of improvement after an issue with a new system, the graphs and ease of use meant that we where quickly able to resolve the issue and provide comprehensive updates to a customer who was concerned around the software's performance

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (Mechanical or Industrial Engineering company, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 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: Great web application for wait stats and trends. Not the tool for those needing actionable alerts.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 19, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use DPA on one team in our department. We have a team of 12 that has access to the tool, although it is mainly just three of us that use it. We do export reports and send to people outside of our team. The tool addresses anomalies that come up across the environment, and patterns before and after changes. We also use it a lot to see what was going on after-hours or when we had an issue come up when no one was available.

Pros

Capturing wait statistics is a great way to monitor performance on a SQL Server instance. This is the main source of info for DPA.
Web app: no client install required. Easy to login from a web browser, share info and manage everything from a browser tab.
Drill-downs from one time interval to seconds to see database activity is intuitive and easy to use.

Cons

Alerts seem to be lacking in DPA compared to competitor's tools. They can be setup but are not quite as easy or as helpful as some other tools I have used.
Grooming/pruning the repository database isn't very easy. We don't manage a lot of instances but our repo DB has grown pretty significantly.
At times when I am drilled-down to a chart, it can be difficult to navigate around from that point to another time range/query/metric.

Likelihood to Recommend

DPA is well suited for an environment where a web app is preferred. Especially if there are several users accessing the reports and data. I would also say it's suited for teams with a good amount of SQL knowledge pertaining to wait types. It would be less suited for teams that need a tool to recommend changes to SQL queries to improve performance, as well as those looking for a tool to send out actionable-alerts that can be turned on or off based on actions.

Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology (Online Media company, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Life saver!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 17, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

DPA is used to monitor the performance of Oracle and MSQL databases. We added a highly critical system in DPA, and DPA can suggest performance enhancement based on findings over the period, like missing indexes and statistics. Also, during ad-hoc performance issues, this helps to identify the current performance, because of easy access like running a session, blocking, and querying a program that is running.

Pros

Index recommendation.
Tuning advisor.
Wait events.

Cons

Always-on monitoring.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's an easy tool to know performance bottlenecks, though the DBA is not from a performance expert background.

Mohamed Shameer

Infrastructure Senior Specialist in Information Technology at Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legcy (Sports, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

13 years of experience

Happy customers, much time saved

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

June 28, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Even though I would consider myself as highly skilled in SQL Server, I found we were spending a lot of our time trying to detect and analyse database performance issues, with varied success. SolarWinds DPA allowed us to almost forget about that entirely, and let us concentrate on the more interesting day to day stuff, sending us emails when things went a bit crazy, and displaying graphs of current activity, which we put on large screens so we can keep half an eye on what's going on.

Pros

Detecting blocking
Showing missing index information
Highlighting the most expensive queries being run in your system
Giving a daily summary of issues
Showing performance history over a long period of time

Cons

The GUI is a little clunky, could do with updating and make it responsive
A mobile app would be great, to keep an eye on things on the go
Perhaps a cut-down version, as sometimes there's just TOO much information!

Likelihood to Recommend

For discovering performance bottlenecks, SolarWinds is absolutely invaluable. Once it's installed (which is a simple process) it completely looks after itself. Finding the blocking process can be a real headache in pure SQL, grabbing process IDs and checking manually up the chain until you find the root process - by which time it's often stopped blocking! SolarWinds does this for you without thinking.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (Retail company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

NCTradeToolReview

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

June 28, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The product best serves its purpose as it works in the background on databases that we have configured as licensed targets. Having almost 400 databases across many environments and platforms, it assists in allowing me to "watch" the customer databases that are needing to be watched with more than just casual monitoring. It allows me to watch wait-issues across releases of our product specific to that customer. It is an invaluable tool.

Pros

Ability to drill down to wait for the issue and have a clear path as to what may be causing the issue.
Ability to quickly add a new target and the ease of installation and upgrades.
Reporting features to group my most troublesome customers into a daily report in one email.
Excellent customer support on any issues I can't immediately solve.

Cons

At this time it solves all my needs, and it appears that your folks have the pulse of this tool as the releases always give me something better to use.

Likelihood to Recommend

A user jabbers to me that over the last week or so the EDI-messaging appears to be slowing down. My first step of course is to glance at the logs from the database to see if there are any database issues, and I rarely find anything there. My next step is to pull up that customer in DPA and look for trends in the time period the user has described. I have yet to not find a direct correlation to the time periods the user has described and the graphical output in DPA. From there it is a simple task to determine which queries are causing the issue, if it's a resource issue, can it be addressed in the short term or do I need to do further research for a longer term solution.

Verified User

Engineer (Logistics and Supply Chain company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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

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DPA: Great web application for wait stats and trends. Not the tool for those needing actionable alerts.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 19, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Capturing wait statistics is a great way to monitor performance on a SQL Server instance. This is the main source of info for DPA.
Web app: no client install required. Easy to login from a web browser, share info and manage everything from a browser tab.
Drill-downs from one time interval to seconds to see database activity is intuitive and easy to use.

Cons

Alerts seem to be lacking in DPA compared to competitor's tools. They can be setup but are not quite as easy or as helpful as some other tools I have used.
Grooming/pruning the repository database isn't very easy. We don't manage a lot of instances but our repo DB has grown pretty significantly.
At times when I am drilled-down to a chart, it can be difficult to navigate around from that point to another time range/query/metric.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology (Online Media company, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience