SolarWinds SQL Sentry Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services Reviews & Insights

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Reviews

18 Reviews

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

Great performance tool for the experienced DBA

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 28, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (Law Practice company, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Why I love SQL Sentry

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 8, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SQL Sentry is one of my favorite tools. In a single dashboard I can see the state of most metrics I care about for daily operations and well being of the SQL instances. The most useful feature is having the ability to trace back performance issues, days and even weeks after they have occurred. You can establish a baseline and detect unusual activity in real-time.

Pros

Troubleshooting performance issues and bottlenecks.
Historical review of spikes and root causes.
Visualizations.

Cons

Better reports.
Customizing the dashboard.
Storing more historical data.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's best for real-time and historical analysis of what is going on in your systems. However, since it's limited to 5000 sessions in some cases it won't fit certain systems.

Verified User

Manager (Information Technology and Services company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Force Multiplier

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 17, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a Managed Service provider, SentryOne provides us with a key platform to monitor, diagnose issues and optimize performance for our customers. The platform provides the capability for services to be monitored 24/7 with in-depth, relevant information to be captured and reviewed for proactive and reactive cases, improving service delivery significantly.

Pros

Provides a fantastic review capability for historic data, collating data in a far more efficient, presentable way than you can with default tools. You know that if a customer experienced even the slightest performance dip overnight, you can review that to the finest detail later.
A highly customisable monitoring system, providing rock solid information which you can drill down to the smallest detail.
An outstanding Support Team, which continues to go above and beyond any expectations.
The perfect SQL Server monitoring platform.

Cons

Has the potential to make the business think they can replace DBAs with this fantastic product.
Windows Integrated Authentication for cross-domain monitoring (but you can monitor across domains, so this can be forgiven!).

Likelihood to Recommend

A customer experiences a slow Analysis Services cube processing overnight from their Data Warehouse and wants to understand why this issue has occurred. SentryOne provides you the capability to see exactly what happened, with just as much detail as if you were sitting on the servers at 3:00am monitoring it directly. This applies for SQL Server, Windows, Azure, APS. Once you have experienced the product, you will realize you must have it.

Verified User

Professional in Information Technology (Information Technology and Services company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

SQL Sentry adds real value for SQL Managed Service providers

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 26, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SQL Sentry to provide an agreeable set of monitoring metrics and results which we use as part of our consulting toolset for MS SQL server. It also forms the basis of our alerting and monitoring framework that we deploy for our clients.

Pros

Easy to implement
Great knowledge base
Excellent support

Cons

I'd like some customisable branding for reports
Having a customisable time allocation table to map alerts to an estimated, predefined chunk of time allotted to resolve the alert

Likelihood to Recommend

SQL Sentry is amazing at getting information relating to the state of SQL servers. Alerts and issues are easy to consume as an action list.

Adrian Sullivan

Senior SQL Engineer in Information Technology at Lexel Systems Limited (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

3 years of experience

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Why Switch to SQL Sentry?

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 8, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SQL Sentry is being used to monitor 260 SQL instances across or enterprise. We are in the process of integrating the alerting capabilities with SCOM via SNMP. Along with alerting SS greatly increase our efficiency in resolving ongoing and past performance issues. SS also provides a central repository for reporting at the enterprise and client level. We previously used a competitors tool for 7 years but moved to SQL Sentry due to the products inability to function in our environment and more so a lack of response to the issues we were experiencing by the vendor. Our experience with SQL Sentry support has been excellent to date.

Pros

Collecting and rolling up SQL statements with the associated plan. The ability to see aggregate and individual execution of SQL statements along with the associated plan is key in rapid diagnosis of bad plans. Bad plans are the most common performance issue we see in the big data environment.
The ability to drill into disk IO. Being able to easily see IO per a file can help identify issues with slow / stressed storage and or poorly distributed tables.
Easily focus on time-frame. Being able to click and drag to select a time frame to analyze from a prior time frame keeps maintains the flow of troubleshooting.
Alerting is inherited and highly configurable.
The collection can be distributed over multiple servers allowing scaling out horizontally and fault tolerance.
AD roles can be used in configuring access to the subsets of the servers being monitored. Access can be configured such that adding a user to an Active Directory role will provide access to just the servers then need to see. This works very well for our client specific operations.

Cons

The presentation of SQL server waits needs work. A large value on a throw away wait like cxpacket will change the scale such that an important wait like sos_schedular _yield is not readable. I have been told this is being addressed in the next release.
Installation of the client requires sysadmin access on the repository server for the initial install. Once the install is complete sysadmin can be removed.
There is a web interface but this does not have much of the functionality yet.
I have not found a way to view page splits over time.

Likelihood to Recommend

I only see one scenario for this type of tool. I want all tools in this category to collect OS and SQL performance metrics over a time frame and present and or alert on them in a way that allows me to diagnose availability and performance issues on the servers. I need this information in real time and historically. I need to be able to report on this information at the micro and macro level. I need a tool that just works and a company that stands behind there tool. SQL Sentry meets these needs.

The only scenario I see were SQL Sentry would not work is were purchase cost of the product is weighted very heavily as opposed to all other factors.

Mark Lessard

Associate Director of Database Architecture in Information Technology at Merkleinc (Marketing and Advertising, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

SQL Sentry Business Use Case

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 22, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SQL Sentry Performance Advisor for real time monitoring of our production systems. It has been extremely useful at providing an at-a-glance summary of current and historical activity. Additionally, the report feature has been invaluable to us for monitoring metrics over time. Performance Advisor has been instrumental in identifying non-SQL related waits that are impacting SQL performance.

Pros

Dashboard tick
Reports
Blocking and Deadlocks

Cons

Make interface less complex
Use simple terminology for menu items

Likelihood to Recommend

SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is well suited for evaluating waits and helps our organization make decisions on scheduling and helps with tuning poorly performing jobs and queries.

Charles Hitchcock

Production Support DBA at Cardlytics, Inc. (Marketing and Advertising, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

TSAP (modest user) Review

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

May 23, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it with certain clients who are not technically experienced with deep understanding of issues that may impact SQL performance - specifically when it comes to the performance monitoring of software we have installed with them. Usually it helps us identify where bottlenecks are impacting performance so that the client may reconfigure issues in their network/resource allocation.

Pros

Easy to interpret interface.
Allows for performance bottlenecks to be quickly identified.
Low footprint.
Brings important parameters and variables together on one screen which is helpful.

Cons

To get SQL Sentry to work properly one needs a reasonable understanding of Microsoft tokens and counters. Including something to hand hold and guide inexperienced users for a typical set up would be good.
A more accessible guide to tokens and counters and what they mean (smart help manual) - would be useful.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited to bottleneck identification - could be a little more helpful for network related problems.

Would it be possible to provide some way to point at remote servers with appropriate corporate hand shaking? We install our software with several clients, and it would be good if we could get through an approval process to point at their environment for intermittent ad-hoc problem solving issues. Continuous monitoring would not be needed, but monitoring whilst doing some observed tests - e.g. running specific sprocs on a specific dataset [would be good].

Adrian Pinington

Owner in Professional Services at TSAP Consulting (Information Technology and Services, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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SQL Sentry solves real world multi application hosting challenges

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 29, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company provides web site hosting. We use SQL Sentry Performance Advisor to monitor the production SQL Server instances supporting our hosting environment. Our hosting SQL Servers support between 10-40 different application databases. The primary driver for the workload on our application databases is the amount of traffic our hosted web sites receive. At any given time the traffic can be spiking on a specific hosted web site which will cause its corresponding database to spike and cause issues for the entire SQL Server.

Pros

Monitor many internal SQL Server metrics that can help provide early warning about potential issues.
Graphing of all metrics over configurable time frames with a comparable baseline for the same time frame. The baseline feature is really helpful for understanding how metrics have changed against what is "normal". The baseline is configurable so you can use yesterday, or the same day last week, or a statistically generated baseline. The workload on our application databases varies greatly between business hours and non-business hours so the baseline feature comparing to same day of the week from the previous week is helpful.
Top consuming queries - SQL Sentry captures the top consuming queries. This helps to identify which database and which function within a database is consuming the most CPU or Disk i/o.
Query Plans - when SQL Sentry captures a top consuming query - it captures its associated Query Plan. This is very helpful for figuring out why a query is consuming so many resources.

Cons

SQL Sentry is a stand alone solution. There is no direct correlation between SQL Sentry events and application exception events or web server events. All correlation has to be done manually. This isn't really a problem directly with SQL Sentry - but is more the nature of using a stand alone solution like SQL Sentry.
Using SQL Sentry for reporting can be slow. SQL Sentry is gathering a lot of data. All of that data is written into a SQL database. Reporting pulls from the same SQL Database. If pulling data for a long time range the resulting report can take a long time to load.
Data Aggregation over time - When you run a report on a specific time range you have very detailed data available. When you run a report over a longer time range the data is aggregated together and specific anomalies get watered down. For example if you run a report over a 10 minute period you will see data at ~1 sec granularity. This makes it really clear where there was a spike in activity. If you run a report over a 24 hour period you will only see general trends. The data is at about 5 min granularity. So there may be a time period where you see a slight rise. You have to zoom in on that specific time frame to see more granular data. As a pro - SQL Sentry makes the process of zooming in and out on different time ranges very easy.

Likelihood to Recommend

SQL Sentry is a cost effective tool for monitoring mission critical database servers where you don't have a team of deeply experienced DBAs. It effectively allows you to buy DBA trouble shooting skills. You still need to have engineers with a good understanding of SQL Server - but SQL Sentry provides them with the tools to be able to trouble shoot SQL Performance problems.

Zachary Peer

Technology Director in Information Technology at One North Interactive (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

SQLSentry Performance Advisor helped me manage my SQL Server environment

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 26, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SQL Sentry Performance Advisor has been used as a primary monitoring tool for our production environment, it has helped us a lot with troubleshooting bottlenecks, finding performance problems, resolving blocking etc. We're using this tool across the whole organization and monitoring around fifteen large production SQL Servers.

Pros

I can see global view of all my monitored servers on single screen with CPU, Memory, Disk & network usages based on last sample or even historical for upto 3 days. Also if there is an area of concerns Performance Advisor will highlighted that server with red or orange depending upon the condition or level of concerns.
Blocking and deadlock situations are clearly visible which gives insight to resolve conflicts.
Disk Activity section provides clear visibility of each and every data files (.MDF, .LDF & .NDF) with the level of activity (Read & Write operations) which is very helpful for us for our OLTP environment to monitor and keep a watch on response from storage system.
Alert system is good.

Cons

I believe SQL Sentry has good alert mechanism but still I see a room for improvement, for example recently we tried to change subject line of specific type of alerts (for example server offline, or high CPU utilization etc.) to make it more meaningful for our organization and we had hard time doing this.
Reports need some improvement, reports are good but I believe few summary report need to be added which reflects overall performance of the environment. For example downtime report is available which serves the purpose of availability but having similar reports to reflect high level performance reporting would be helpful.
In the global view under the disk section ms/IO shows the values based on the sample and changes the color from depending upon threshold which is a good feature. Also, upon right click it allows to generate quick report which again shows time & value for ms/IO. So, it would be a great feature if SQL Sentry can add a functionality to show which particular LUN(s) is responding slowly.

Likelihood to Recommend

I believe it is a great monitoring tool for highly transaction environments.

Ashish Upadhyay

Manager of Database Administration in Information Technology at UnitedLex Corporation (Legal Services, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

SQL Sentry helps me do my job!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 25, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SQL Sentry Performance Advisor is being used to monitor our important SQL Server Production servers. I use it when I need to find out what is causing an outage of an application and to find out what SQL is possibly causing slower performance. I also use it to find times when the load is greater on resources, for example, on the CPU. I find it to be a very valuable tool in gaining visibility into my servers.

Pros

Graphs showing load on resources in both SQL and Windows.
Showing detail when a deadlock occurs so that it's obvious what SQL is running that has caused the killing of a victim process.
Retaining historical data so that an issue can be researched thoroughly.

Cons

Sometimes the graphs are a curve and sometimes they are blocks - I'm not sure why - I'd probably prefer to always see curves.
When looking at blocking, I would prefer ordering to be of the longest running process descending to the shortest running process.
I find it a little difficult to understand the results of the Top SQL. I'm not sure how it could be clearer and cleaner but there may be some room for improvement there.

Likelihood to Recommend

Researching blocking and looking at resource usage - both real time and historically.

Sheila Champion

DBA in Information Technology at The Network, A NAVEX Global Company (Information Technology and Services, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

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SQL Sentry solves real world multi application hosting challenges

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 29, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Monitor many internal SQL Server metrics that can help provide early warning about potential issues.
Graphing of all metrics over configurable time frames with a comparable baseline for the same time frame. The baseline feature is really helpful for understanding how metrics have changed against what is "normal". The baseline is configurable so you can use yesterday, or the same day last week, or a statistically generated baseline. The workload on our application databases varies greatly between business hours and non-business hours so the baseline feature comparing to same day of the week from the previous week is helpful.
Top consuming queries - SQL Sentry captures the top consuming queries. This helps to identify which database and which function within a database is consuming the most CPU or Disk i/o.
Query Plans - when SQL Sentry captures a top consuming query - it captures its associated Query Plan. This is very helpful for figuring out why a query is consuming so many resources.

Cons

SQL Sentry is a stand alone solution. There is no direct correlation between SQL Sentry events and application exception events or web server events. All correlation has to be done manually. This isn't really a problem directly with SQL Sentry - but is more the nature of using a stand alone solution like SQL Sentry.
Using SQL Sentry for reporting can be slow. SQL Sentry is gathering a lot of data. All of that data is written into a SQL database. Reporting pulls from the same SQL Database. If pulling data for a long time range the resulting report can take a long time to load.
Data Aggregation over time - When you run a report on a specific time range you have very detailed data available. When you run a report over a longer time range the data is aggregated together and specific anomalies get watered down. For example if you run a report over a 10 minute period you will see data at ~1 sec granularity. This makes it really clear where there was a spike in activity. If you run a report over a 24 hour period you will only see general trends. The data is at about 5 min granularity. So there may be a time period where you see a slight rise. You have to zoom in on that specific time frame to see more granular data. As a pro - SQL Sentry makes the process of zooming in and out on different time ranges very easy.

Likelihood to Recommend

Zachary Peer

Technology Director in Information Technology at One North Interactive (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile