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BMC TrueSight vs IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 7, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

BMC TrueSight
Ranking in Event Monitoring
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (28th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (31st), Cloud Monitoring Software (25th), AIOps (5th)
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manage...
Ranking in Event Monitoring
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Event Monitoring category, the mindshare of BMC TrueSight is 7.2%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server is 2.9%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Event Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
BMC TrueSight7.2%
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server2.9%
Other89.9%
Event Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Has improved monitoring efficiency and supports fast issue resolution through responsive support and reliable automation
I work with BMC TrueSight and have been using it for eight-plus years BMC TrueSight brought a positive impact and benefits to our organization. The customization part is one of the advantages of the product, along with the monitoring capabilities. Automated root cause analysis and predictive…
reviewer2317098 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Offers effective monitoring of resources but lacks the ability to connect to an AWS instance and write custom queries.
We use it mainly for monitoring, including CPU, memory, and disk space, and for troubleshooting purposes We've set up alerts to notify us when performance deviates from the baseline we've configured for each resource. So, whenever that happens, we get an alert and can investigate immediately. So,…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable features of the solution are alert management, alert generation, and event management."
"Helix Innovation Studio is a very good feature. It allows us to develop our own enterprise applications and make them available for the customers."
"Valuable features include wide support for monitoring, strong event management, service management capability, baselining (analytics) and easy to integrate other tools with it."
"The solution's event management capabilities are fantastic. We do a best of breed. If, on the network side, they use a different tool, we pull all that data in so that we have a single console. It's kind of like the monitor of monitors. We're able to aggregate all the different types of data sets, whether it's log data, app data, OS data, infrastructure data, or network data. We're able to aggregate all those events and then correlate and be able to say we're having an event."
"The most valuable features of BMC TrueSight Operations Management are the blackouts and event management."
"The ability of this platform to monitor the very diverse assets that we maintain around the world is its most valuable feature... We support a vast array of manufacturers' equipment, like HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Hitachi... We can do it all with [this] one [solution]."
"It is a stable solution."
"I like everything about this tool. I recommend this solution to anyone looking for a standalone solution with high availability meaning that can be used depending on the customers requirements."
"The best part of SQL DM is the ability to customize alerts and counters. This allows our team to find an issue then alert on the issue at a granular level."
"The most valuable features are disk space projections for planning, and also the Snapshotting ability, to look back in time, to see what was going on the server at a particular time. It's basically the output of an sp_who2."
"The ability to go back and look at historical data is the most valuable feature."
"We're able to diagnose issues prior to their actually becoming issues. Without the alerting, we wouldn't have a clue as to what was going to happen. With the alerting, it gives us a heads-up that a specific threshold has been met, and we need to take specific action."
"SQL DM made troubleshooting much easier and allowed multiple people to look into an issue with confidence."
"Memory and CPU utilization features are good."
"Monitors and alerts on our mission critical instances in real-time on a 24/7 basis."
 

Cons

"There are some complexities with deployment that could be improved in BMC TrueSight."
"The UI for the end users could be improved and more flexible than it is now."
"More modules for less popular applications and better documentation."
"In our company, we faced some issues with the solution’s application endpoint, IP, and the physical location of the transactions."
"One of the things that the TrueSight environment is missing is some of the HA abilities. The data collection server called the ISM doesn't really have the HA functionality or workload balancing. It was missing from the previous product as well. It's missing redundancy."
"BMC's online documentation is often incorrect or incomplete."
"Reporting would be an area for improvement in TrueSight... We have almost 800 customers today on TrueSight and just under 10,000 assets. We need to be able to give a customer some information. If the customer's product fails, they'll ask us, "Did it have a problem beforehand?" We have all those events and we know all the problems it had beforehand. We have to be able to give them access to that kind of reporting. That's an enhancement that we need."
"The stability of BMC TrueSight Operations Management needs improvement. My organization's infrastructure is vast and implemented based on BMC recommendations, but the solution needs to be optimized for large-capacity infrastructure."
"The initial setup gives too many user rights to the server, so you have to put a user that is part administrator's group - that's the preferred way - on each server, which is kind of a risk. You want to do least privilege and you're not doing that."
"I'm going to do an upgrade which may resolve my issues, but one area for improvement is its ability to handle the amount of data that we collect with it. We're likely one of the largest installations, with over 300 servers being collected with this product, and sometimes there are gaps. That would really be my only concern, in terms of how the data is collected and stored, for consistency."
"I would absolutely love to create customized dashboards but, unfortunately, they don't provide me the information that I need to create the report. The report I need is the detail or the transaction detail that's happening on those Snapshots. I'd like to be able to go back through time and search for things. I don't have that functionality, which is very disappointing. That's pretty bad and frustrating because I could query it and find out so much information about what's hitting my environment and when, but instead, they want control over it and to not give me that information. So it's encrypted. I can't pull it out and that is really bothersome."
"One thing I'd like to see is the ability to view the execution plan and have the system automatically recommend potential query optimizations, especially at the query level."
"It would helpful if SQL DM could mark when changes are made within the program."
"We don't find that it helps us with performance monitoring and diagnostics. We find that SentryOne does that better. Also, in terms of alerts, we had to customize them dramatically so that we didn't get alerted on every little thing."
"They can improve checking the status of the CPU, memory, and IO utilization from each task."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is moderately expensive."
"It is a relatively inexpensive solution."
"Pricing is very high."
"We pay license fees of between $150 and $200 per asset. There is an enterprise software license fee, and then you pay a percentage for your maintenance, and then Premier Support. For example, if you buy a two-year license for the product, then the maintenance fee is added to that for two years at X percent a year. Then there's a small fee on top of that for Premier Support..."
"We're end-of-lifeing it now. Overall, the licensing costs of BMC are a challenge for us in that they're hard costs, whereas open-source monitoring has soft costs, where it's harder to line-item."
"There is a big upfront cost when you buy the license, then there is annual maintenance. We look at, if I bought a license and paid for maintenance for five years, then average it out, what would be my monthly cost. We have had some of the competing tools come in around four dollars. This is coming in as a premium, which is why I don't have it deployed as I would like it. Therefore, we're in negotiations right now. If I can get it down to the four dollar range, I will triple my deployment in a year and a half."
"Annual licensing amount depends on the customers requirements. Support is an additional fee and there are options for three and five year support."
"We did a five-year, multimillion dollar deal."
"We were upgraded to Premium Support without their actually asking us, when we were quoted. Then I asked for Standard Support and that they had to re-quote us that. But they don't do that by default. They upcharge you by default, which I didn't think was very nice, without even asking."
"The pricing is reasonable, it's comparable with the competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BMC TrueSight Operations Management?
The solution provides visibility to our infrastructure, how it is, the resources we are monitoring, and quick updates when it has any problems. We have integrated it with ServiceNow to open instances.
What needs improvement with BMC TrueSight Operations Management?
There are some complexities with deployment that could be improved in BMC TrueSight.
Ask a question
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Also Known As

ProactiveNet, TrueSight Operations Management
IDERA SQL DM, IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ensono, Transamerica, Boston Scientific, Park Place Technologies, inContact, TD Ameritrade, PNC Bank
Padnos, University of Notre Dame, D4, Infeon Technologies, Chevron, LC Waikiki, Sisters of Saint Francis Health Services, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, CVE, Colorado State University, St. Charles, Chaucer PLC, 1-800-Flowers, Ancoris, Money Management, National Opinion Research Center, California Department of Health, Plexus; Aviva, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, CBS, Comcast, Google, Merck, Regions Financial, Schneider Electric, Tata Consultancy Services, Verizon Communications, Zurich Financial Services
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC TrueSight vs. IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,768 professionals have used our research since 2012.