SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Reviews

It was installed at a previous company I worked for, and they used it extensively there. It was cross-platform, so it was more than just SQL Server. It could work with SQL Server, Postgres and do all of the system metrics, such as RAM consumption, IO, network traffic, etc. It was a more in-depth package, but it was also rather expensive if I remember it correctly.

In my current company, I'm a new principal DBA. They hired me a week and a half ago, and I'm evaluating solutions to possibly purchase.

In terms of deployment, it has both on-prem and cloud deployments.

Monitoring is most valuable, and being able to know that there is an issue or problem and I need to go look is also valuable. So, monitoring and learning are the most important features.

I'm sure there are areas of improvement, but I don't have any direct information on that right now. I'm brand new to the role in this company.

It is capable, but I don't believe it has the right value matrix. It also depends on the budget of the company.

In addition to SolarWinds DPA, I've also dealt with Quest Spotlight and Redgate in the past. Among these three, SolarWinds DPA is my least favorite.

I'm currently evaluating solutions to possibly purchase. The use case is to know:

• What is my database doing?
• What sort of pressure is coming? Is it proc, memory, or network?

I also want a deeper level of analytical capability to be able to go into the actual queries and analyze that level of performance. I don't want only monitoring. I also want a deeper level of capability. 

I am also looking for added features such as backup, execution plan exploration, execution plan comparison, and change tracking and control. I want a backup feature like the Redgate Toolbelt, which has multiple products. They've got the backup native in their bundle. Quest has an add-on product called LightSpeed for their backup, which is a very capable product. So, I'm trying to bring all of my SQL DBA management and monitoring needs into one unified solution. It is not only about deployments across multiple servers. I need to be able to run one script across my entire setup with one or two clicks, as opposed to having to log in to each and every one of them, which is a nightmare. I would like to be able to push changes out to all of them with one click.

I would rate it a five out of 10. 

We are a standard edition shop for Oracle. We don't have access to a lot of the enterprise edition performance analysis feature. We don't get AWR reports. We don't get a lot of visibility into the database performance. DPA, for us, breaches that gap and it gives us a real nice, very concise graphical interface and visibility into the database performance itself. That's the thing that, the million-dollar bonus for us right there

It has been a cultural change for us. The interface is really easy to use, so we can create an internal web link that sends users, developers, management to the DPA tool. Even though those people aren't DPAs, they can get in and they can drill into data and it's very easy to present that very visual data to teams, to departments, to management, to get them to understand where we're having a performance problem, what the consequence to that problem is, what the impact of it is. That does a lot to move a conversation forward to assigning resources to getting performance issues that are outside of the database addressed in a pretty timely manner.

It's a graphical tool, so it lets you see wait time for a database instance. That's really nice when you're dealing with similar instances. One of things that I'd like to see is when you're dealing with a clustered instance or a rack instance, being able to visualize all the nodes for that one rack instance on a single page, so you can see if a particular node is maybe taking more load, if there's a problem with one of the nodes in your cluster, something like that.

Well, what I just mentioned with the kind of more integrated view for clustered systems. They are pretty on top of their community. They've got a website where you can go in and you can make feature requests. I don't have any real concerns with performance. Installation is good. Support is good. I'd say that my thoughts for improvement are pretty trivial. Maybe the type of thing that I wouldn't even categorize that as annoyances. When you get into the administration screen, there are three broad categories that you can select from. When you go into one of those categories, you can do something. When you come back to the previous screen, it takes you to that first screen where you have the three categories.

We have not had any issues with it. We've been running it for, I think, about two and a half years now and the only downtime we've experienced is just for standard patching. A new version comes out and so you shut down the web server. You roll the patch in or roll the new version in and bring it back up. We're down for like 20 minutes maybe.

We haven't really had any issues with it. Again, we're a pretty small shop. We have nine database instances. Scalability is more of just a licensing factor. As you want to monitor more instances, you go out and you just purchase more licensing.

I have not had to open up many tickets. In two and a half years, I think, probably four, five tickets that we've opened with them. Probably three of those I'm going to say were more of a how do we get more out of this feature versus actual technical problems, but in every case, the sport has been really prompt. I think the first experience that I had with them, the guy responded back by email or the tech support responded back by email within 5, 10 minutes. They're really responsive, really on top of things. It seems like they have a strong sense of customer service and wanting to make sure that their customers are satisfied and understand to solve your problem, if there's anything else, if you have any other questions, that sort of things. It's been really positive for us.

It was really straightforward. We initially downloaded it as a trial and put in on some old hardware. Just thinking "We'll see how this goes." We used it for, I think, it was a 30-day trial and within about, I don't know, 10 days, we made a decision and said, "Yeah, we're going to buy this." Bought the licenses and just applied them to that instance that we've expanded up on. We recently moved it into a full-fledged production environment. It was working and it wasn't, there are too many other fires so we didn't end up moving it right away like we should've. Then re-installing it on that other box, migrating it to a new hardware, new operating system, new database backend, was really straightforward. I think it might have taken us 30 minutes. Their documentation was pretty straightforward. There's not a whole lot to it.

We were looking for something that was going to be usable not just to our database administrators, but to the enterprise as a whole. We didn't want something that was really complex to use, that was going to be awkward for people. The DPA tool has a really clean interface. It's really straightforward to use. You can drill into data and get a lot of depth from it and that's something that we didn't find in the competitors tools. Not that you can't drill in with competitive tools and get that same information, but the ease of getting to that deep level of information was much tougher. Most of the other products weren't as navigable. DPA, for us, was such a straightforward easy tool. There are a couple of help screens that pop up when you first start using it and you get in there and execute them once you understand how it works. Like I said, you can give it to a developer, you can give to someone that's not highly technical and they can figure out how to use it in just a couple of minutes and get right in there.

I am really happy with it. There's continuous improvement and updates that are taking place. They do a lot of betas. They seem to listen to their user community. It does what it says it's going to do. It does it really easily. To me, that's the definition of a really good tool or a great tool, is you don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to use it and it just works.

It's a pretty lightweight product. You could, I'm sure, get away ... It's based on a web server so you could probably install it on a system that was supporting other similar applications and get away with that if you were concerned about building out a dedicated platform for the product. I would say, probably the best advice would be to get involved in their support community and be involved in that. There're so much great information from users, customizations, that you users provide that you can implement in your own environment to get even more out of the product. Then, in turn, that you could contribute to the environment as well.

In my previous company, I was using this solution to implement monitoring callbacks. 

Currently, I work for a system integrator and I am implementing DPAs for some of our clients.

We have an on-premises deployment.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the support for older databases and the ability to manage them in a centralized dashboard. For example, I can see my SQL servers and DB2 servers on one dashboard.

The alerting and reporting functions really need to be improved because they are hard to configure. This is not just an issue for customers. Specialty monitoring is difficult. The reports and alerts should be easier to create.

The dashboards and reports should be more customizable.

The dashboard has become easier to use with the Orion integration, but it still needs improvement.

Technical support for this solution needs to be improved.

I have had some issues with scalability for the Orion interface.

There are two user interfaces for this solution, which are the Orion platform and the DPA. The DPA is quite stable, but the Orion is not so much.

I do not have experience with scaling this product a great deal, although I think that it will be enough for mid-size or large-size companies. At the same time, I don't think it will be used by ISPs or much bigger companies.

I do not think that SolarWinds support is very good because it just takes too long to solve the problem. Eventually, they attempt to solve your issues, one way or another, but it takes too long for the support.

I have knowledge of other solutions, but I did not use another one prior to this.

This solution is very easy to set up.

The deployment normally takes three or four days. This is enough to monitor all of the databases. However, creating reports and dashboards takes much more time than that.

I am the person who implements and deploys this solution for our customers. One it is deployed, the customers can use it easily.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is not to use the default reports. DPA gives very detailed information with customer reports. If you have time to investigate then you will find many good examples of reports and dashboards online.

The solution is quite ready to use as soon as you install it, although there are a lot of custom things that can be implemented.

Overall, this is a good solution but it needs easier reporting and more customizable dashboards. Also, scalability for the Orion sites needs to be improved.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Ability to drill down queries, and wait times using the Query Advice Dashboard.

We have multiple applications interfacing with our SQL servers, this allowed us to load balance between servers based on performance data gathered about all applications. I love the ability to very easily see graphical trends.

2 years approximately, we started with a small number of SQL servers, now we have added Oracle Enterprise servers. We compared with our existing Foglight solutions and our DBA opted for migrating to SolarWinds.

No

No

No

Has been good, but for this product, we have not had any issues requiring assistance. Very easy to implement and use.

We migrated from Foglight, we were already vested in SolarWinds products, we really switched because it removed complexity and still gave great analysis.

Straightforward. Was very impressed.

In House.

We find that the price to value ratio is very good. Much less expensive than other products we were considering.

We use this tool constantly, all new projects with new SQL Servers now require a license for SolarWinds DB Analyzer in order to meet high standards of operation.