Item: SolarWinds SQL Sentry
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SQL Sentry Performance Advisor

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to troubleshoot client SQL server instances that are experiencing performance issues. The issues are generally related to poor queries and/or lack of index maintenance, but they're problems that clients are unable to track down themselves. Most the majority of them are small businesses that don't have in house IT expertise, especially with SQL server.

Pros and Cons

Pros

The tool is extremely effective at quickly finding performance bottlenecks
The ability to find exactly the troublesome queries and perform target traces on demand.
The workflow of SQL Sentry is easy to use and just lets you get about the business of finding/resolving problems and not have to worry about learning the interface.

Cons

Would love to have some form of multi tenancy even if it means a subset or reduced functionality for those users. The ability to X user access to only information about Y databases in a given instance or instances

Alternatives Considered

Confio

SQL Sentry PA was much easier, faster to implement and quicker to get the data we were looking for out of it.

Likelihood to Recommend

We would be able to use more instances of it on a different pricing model such as an on-demand (pay as you go) or SPLA (service provider) licensing.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Feature Ratings

Comments

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Rick Pittser
(Vendor Representative) commented 8 years ago
Hello, SQL Sentry appreciates you taking the time to provide some great information on how you use SQL Sentry to help you improve the performance of your environment, and on how we could make it better. While SQL Sentry was designed for DBA’s by DBA’s, we are seeing more and more varying groups of users using SQL Sentry, from managers to reporting groups. This means there is a growing need for varying levels of accessibility, and this is something we are looking into. However, as it stands, we do have two main types of client security that can be used to limit what a SQL Sentry user can see and interact with within the client. First is Role Based security (http://www.sqlsentry.com/help/ug/#Role_Based_Security_Overview.html ). Role Based security can be used to limit available functionality a given user has, and can even be used to achieve read only access. Secondly we have Rights Based security (http://www.sqlsentry.com/help/ug/#SQL_Sentry_Client_Security.html ). Rights Based security can be used to limit what monitored connections a particular user can see and interact with within the SQL Sentry client. In addition, a combination of both of these security models can be utilized. I also wanted to mention that we now provide additional licensing types with subscription and core based licensing. Thank you for your review, and for being a valued SQL Sentry customer.

SQL Sentry Performance Advisor -- A Must Have Tool!