SolarWinds SQL Sentry Manufacturing Reviews & Insights

I manage the department that is responsible for all of the company's databases. We use SolarWinds SQL Sentry for monitoring our SQL servers proactively as well as reactive troubleshooting.

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.

We have used SQL Sentry primarily for helping us monitor and proactively deal with performance issues with SQL Server. When we have a performance problem this tool has been quite helpful at reviewing past history and allow us to see patterns that may be causing us issues and helps us identify areas we can make changes to improve performance.

I feel this tool is ideally suited for monitoring performance issues in an OLTP environment maybe not so much for DW applications.

SQL Sentry started out being used by one division/group and has now expanded to another group and working on expanding to additional areas. It is being used to proactively discover database related issues and manage SQL jobs across different database servers.

I would think for mid-size groups/divisions it works the best. I cannot imagine having more than 10 or so servers on one monitoring service. It is great when you have a lot of inexperienced users hitting the same database servers with ad hoc queries. SQL Sentry is much more powerful than I know I am using it for, it just takes time to figure out what is best for your own use.

SQL Sentry is being used to monitor performance and support troubleshooting issues in our SQL Server infrastructure. It provides thorough and more complete information than the native tools. We use it across the main SQL Server Farm by a team of 5 DBAs

This product has value for medium to large SQL Server infrastructures. Smaller instantiations of less than 10 instances will derive value but not as much as those organizations with 10 or more servers to monitor. SQL Sentry's newer product (SQL Sentry Essentials) is the appropriate choice for these cases.

We use it to monitor our critical SQL server cluster and it is currently just used by the DBAs. It allows us to monitor in real time but also allows us to better understand why problems had happened so we can prevent them from reoccurring.

We use Performance Advisor to monitor our database servers. We use this tool within the IT department to pinpoint pressure points, search for expensive queries, and for capacity planning of our databases. From a business perspective, this tool helps us to address performance problems introduced by new code and plan for new infrastructure.

Performance Advisor is specifically designed for MSSQL database servers located within a Microsoft domain. I can not vouch for the product in monitoring Oracle databases or environments where a non-Microsoft domain is used, or no domain is used at all.

The product really helps us with finding bottlenecks in our SQL servers fast! You get a great overview of the systems performance. I really recommend this product to anyone that has issues with knowing what their SQL server is doing.

I think for our environment it is perfect!

I use SQL Sentry Performance Advisor almost on a daily basis, as does a few of my IT associates. Our original goal was to identify and correct inefficiencies when many of our servers were riddled with problems. SQL Sentry made it very easy to identify problems and patterns in a fraction of the time it would have taken to dig through a bunch of log files. The graphical representations within SQL Sentry and the way that the objects on screen are tied together make it easy to catch issues at a glance, and zoom in to a more narrow timeframe to see how one problem can affect different aspects of server performance. We monitor various production application and database servers with alerts setup for each of them. SQL Sentry has not only helped us identify issues to be corrected, but over time, has helped us redefine our approach to become a more proactive shop.

I use Performance Advisor all the time, but I rarely use it by itself. I believe that the best use of Performance Advisor is with SQL Sentry Event Manager on a database server. The history feature allows you to quickly see a pattern of how the server responds to jobs running in the databases (like when a looping database job eats up the temp db, and spills into the page file). It takes only a moment to see that some jobs need to be fixed while others only need to be rescheduled. At a glance, I can see how my daily and monthly schedules are affecting the server, and when I need to make an adjustment to avoid a failure on the server or the database. So much useful info to proactively address all of the issues that I have been used to reacting to for so long. There are many other cool benefits to SQL Sentry, but this is what I have found to be the most impactful use of SQL Sentry.

We currently use SQL Sentry Performance advisor in our IT Application Infrastructure Team. We use it to pro actively monitor the database resources and trends. Based on trending we take corrective measures.

Well suited to trouble shoot and finding RCA to performance issues. If trending analysis is the only purpose, this is an overkill.

SQL Sentry was purchased to monitor our new Business Intelligence Infrastructure. The tool allows us to see at a glance if we have any performance issues; we also utilise the alerting feature heavily to make sure that even when we are not in the office or connected we can still see how the server is performing.

SQL Sentry hits the spot when using it for a business intelligence server.