We've purchased SolarWinds SQL Sentry in order to have eyes inside our database servers. From the moment that we rolled it out, people were excited to use it and couldn't believe that such a tool exists [that] can provide so many details on the queries and performance inside the server. It has helped us to discover performance issues, bugs, and much more.
Pros
Jobs management
Locking investigation
Performance analyze
Monitoring of AlwaysON
Cons
Creating smoother integration to 3rd part tools, such as Slack, PagerDuty, etc.
Adding the ability to have an option for adding custom metrics defined by user queries
Adding more dashboards and visibility into the SQL Sentry Portal
Likelihood to Recommend
[SolarWinds] SQL Sentry is well suited for any production SQL Server that has performance issues or a need to look into the guts of the server itself. Using the very specific features that are targeting SQL Server, you can see that every feature you use was described by the hands of a DBA and it is suited to be used by one. It is not suitable to be used with other database technologies at the moment.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Gambling & Casinos company, 1001-5000 employees)
The dashboard view of our server allows us to monitor the activity on our primary system and at a glance know if there is an issue. Getting to travel back in time and isolate performance issues is a huge bonus for us. We have been able to optimize and reduce issues with our database allowing our users to have a better experience with the dependent software. We also use it to monitor and plan our ETL jobs to not interfere with each other. In our regional community, we recommend others to SQL Sentry to monitor their Microsoft SQL instances.
Pros
Real-Time Monitoring
Top Long Running SQL
Performance troubleshooting
Job Monitoring/Planning
Procedure and Query Statistics
Shiny Easy to use interface for those not comfortable with writing Queries
Cons
Integration with Azure Data Studio
A Containerized, platform agnostic web client
Support for Other Operating Systems
Support for other databases
Likelihood to Recommend
Just had an end-user approach me about a long-running report. I was able to utilize the Top SQL tab and view the long-running report, copy the SQL being executed so I can place it in a notebook for later review for performance optimization. My manager looked in on the DBA Space earlier this morning to inquire about login issues for an application. As we had the dashboard loaded on our primary monitor, we were able to quickly glance and identify that the issue was not with the database. The issue was with a specific web server that was identified with other tools. We received a lot of calls in a short period of time with reports of 504 issues in the application. Using the Top SQL tab, identified that there was a report query being run multiple times that was causing table locks to not release. All these issues were identified in seconds with SentyOne. Most were resolved in under 60 seconds from the initial report of concern.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (Education Management company, 1001-5000 employees)
Our organization is using SQL Sentry to monitor a group of high-profile SQL Servers for performance problems. The DBA team relies on this tool to quickly resolve performance issues -- sometimes before the users even notice something is wrong. It also helps with long-term capacity planning by giving us historical trends of many useful metrics.
Pros
The performance dashboards are very useful and help bring attention directly to the problem areas.
The alerting system is extremely customizable,, so you don't get peppered with a bunch of useless alerts that make you blind to real action-worthy alerts.
The reporting is powerful enough to provide exactly what you need to see trends over time.
Cons
The alert customization is powerful, but can be cumbersome to set up.
There is so much information on the screen at any given time that without some practice it can be overwhelming.
Likelihood to Recommend
This solution is perfect for a team with a large server count and, at least, moderate experience supporting a SQL Server environment. If the environment is smaller or the team has less experience working with SQL Server performance tuning methodologies, then the tool may be overwhelming for the users.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (Law Practice company, 1001-5000 employees)
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.
Pros
The Top SQL functionality has been extremely useful for identifying poorly performing queries by resource consumption.
The flexibility of creating your own Advisory Conditions has allowed us to integrate our custom internal alerts into a centralized dashboard and alerting platform.
Being able to highlight any chart on the dashboard and then tool-matching that window across all the other charts makes it much easier to correlate the different performance metrics against each other.
Cons
While creating Advisory Conditions is extremely flexible it can be a bit challenging to get everything correct. Some sort of interactive tutorial would be really helpful.
The alert messages are very detailed, but it takes a bit to learn how to parse them. Some sort of enriched HTML format would be a nice quality of life improvement.
There are half a million configurable options in multiple places. Some sort of search feature would be fantastic.
Likelihood to Recommend
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 are using SQL Sentry to centralize our SQL server monitoring from a number of differing domains. For the first time at this organization, we are getting a comprehensive view of our entire SQL estate. The previous solution was a mix of individual alerts on various SQL instances and several instances of a competing monitoring tool.
Pros
Metrics collection
Collects data across differing domains
SQL Plan Explorer is part of the tool
Alert configuration is amazing
Customer support is outstanding
Cons
No metrics for replication, but does alert
Thick client is slow and almost unusable over a VPN
The alert configuration is so flexible that it has a steep learning curve
Likelihood to Recommend
SQL Sentry is so flexible it's amazing. It comes with a steep learning curve and will take time to truly implement and dial in, but you're not alone--customer support is outstanding. My biggest complaint is that the thick client is slow and almost unusable over a VPN. Since COVID hit, that's a big deal. The web portal is snappy and fast, and I look forward to when the thick client is retired in favor of the portal.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (Computer Software company, 1001-5000 employees)
We use SentryOne to monitor our Production SQL instances for the entire organization. We choose SentryOne as our monitoring solution to reduce dependency on custom written alerts. This eliminates having to maintain custom alert compatibility with different versions of SQL Server and we are confident in the best practice standards SentryOne uses to develop their alerts. SentryOne is my first place to go when problems arise, and SentryOne is usually the first to let me know there is a problem.
Pros
Because of previous products, we had been accustomed to receiving emails for our alerts. SentryOne provides this functionality with great features like not using it for everything monitored to preventing our mailbox from being flooded by controlling alerts to a certain amount in a time frame (customizable) and an alert to tell you that limit has been reached.
SentryOne provides a great blocking page to help understand a blocking chain quickly. It is also configurable to ignore short term blocking that hasn't run long enough to be of concern.
Top-SQL has been a helpful feature to recognize processes or jobs that run beyond their normal run time. Also, helpful when looking for what was running during times an issue has come up and we need to see what was running in the past.
Cons
There is still some work to do with the baseline data. I am sure there are a great number of alerts that could be created using this data to highlight variations beyond normal.
All the alerts have the ability to trigger a response, providing some best practice configurations of these might help us to use these features more often.
Could use better documentation on the ports and firewall settings needed during the process of adding an instance to monitoring. This has proven to be different than what is used once monitoring is setup.
Likelihood to Recommend
SQL Sentry has a very simple to follow layout for configuration and is easily adapted to each instance that has special requirements. Also, having the option to configure an alert to do more than one action is invaluable. Using the Alerting Channel, emails, and running scripts to address the issue automatically provides great value. Being able to set time windows of when to monitor and not monitor, as well as turning off all monitoring as needed by the server or reducing unneeded alerts during maintenance.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (Education Management company, 1001-5000 employees)
We use SQL Sentry in my department to monitor patterns and fluctuations in performance for our SQL Servers. It's helped us address monthly spikes and unusual performance dips, so we know when we have a bug in just-released code and we know when to prepare for slightly-slower systems and address that accordingly.
Pros
offers good insight into data that would otherwise be time-consuming to compile
performance tuning
monitoring metrics
Cons
customization of alerts can be tricky
could have more granular data
summary reports could be more complete
Likelihood to Recommend
SQL Sentry is a great monitoring tool for performance in environments that are transaction-heavy. It gives a complex overall view of performance on a daily/hourly/etc. basis so you know where spikes are happening (and when, more importantly). It also provides insight into blocking processes, so if you have a long-running query/job, you can see what's happening more clearly.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (Insurance company, 10,001+ employees)
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.
Pros
SQL job management.
SQL server monitoring.
Alerting.
Cons
Windows task management.
Object hierarchy.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
VU
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (Medical Device company, 10,001+ employees)
We use SQL Sentry to help us identify performance issues and remediate them quickly. In addition, we use it to alert on blocking and deadlocks.
Pros
I like the way that the graphs on the dashboard can be selected and synchronize to show how each are related.
The ease at which problematic SQL can be identified by spikes on the dashboard make this tool invaluable to a Performance Engineering team.
Cons
We have a number of installations across different environments and solution lines. The tool needs to be able to switch between them within the tree view instead of needing to connect to a different installation from the file menu
We receive frequent timeouts when looking at the Top SQL tab on our busiest SQL servers with a lot of history. Something needs to be done on large repositories
Likelihood to Recommend
SQL Sentry is very useful in production and performance testing environments for identifying and fixing slow performing applications. It is difficult on very high volume instances with a lot of history.
My team uses SentryOne to monitor our production SQL environment. They will use it as a first tool to verify system health when pulled into production issues. If SQL is determined to be the bottleneck in process, we'll use the information SentryOne provides to pinpoint the problem code and pass the information onto developers for fine tuning. In our development environment, our developers also have the client tools to monitor their processes. If we had licenses available for the Dev/Test servers, then we could fine tune them before releasing code to production. This is limited because we only have a few licenses to spare for Dev/Test.
Pros
It has an easy to use interface/dashboard; it doesn't require a lot training or reading to get information. Most of the key counters are on the main dashboard and the rest of the data you're looking for is usually just a tab away.
Historical information: By the time I get the call, the system is usually back to normal, so having the ability to look back in time and pinpoint when problems started is essential for us when determining the root cause of problems.
One tool: Not only can it determine what is causing the issue, SentryOne also captures the detail and plans for code being executed. It allow me to drill into the plans and get down to the nitty gritty code all within one interface. No need to buy additional tools or load into Management Studio to get more details.
Cons
Tuning advice: With all the graphs and data available, it's not always easy to determine the best thing to do. I'd like to see SentryOne provide some best practice analysis based on the historical information collected for the server being looked at.
They could add help tips or links to help documents, when you select a graph on the dashboard. Inexperienced users tend to put blinders on and focus on one thing when they see a high counter or something out of the ordinary. It would be very useful to include a link that provides underlying help. The link would provide an explanation of the counter in detail and offer possible explanations as to why the counter is off.
Likelihood to Recommend
It has great out-of-the-box features that make it easy to install and get it up and running right away. However, fine tuning and customization of the solution, like setting up custom alerts and notifications, needs to be someones dedicated responsibility. Because of this, we don't necessarily have the time allocated to become true subject matter experts on the tool. What we get out of the box is usually going to be the norm.
