July 23, 2009 at 2:41 am
Hello,
I've looked around but was unable to find recent comparisson reviews off SQL Monitoring Software.
I've been asked to review SQL Server Monitoring software. Our instances are a mixture of SQL 2000, 2005, 2008. We are also shortly looking to virtualise some of the instances. I'm looking at software which will monitor our instances i.e. (CPU, Memory, I/O, blocking, Cluster, disk space etc) and alert us based upon certain thresholds.
I was wondering if anyone had recently reviewed or could point me to any reviews? I'd also like to hear from anyone with experience of the following products and what they thought of them?
Idera - Diagnostic Manager
Red Gate - SQL Response
Quest - Spotlight.
If there any others worth looking at, i'd appreiciate if you could let me know.
Many Thanks
July 23, 2009 at 4:32 am
We use SQL Sentry by SQL Sentry Inc. I don't know how it compares to the other products you listed, but it is a lot cheaper! 😉
There is also some not very publicised software from Microsoft called SQLH2, but you'd have to add on your own alerting mechanisms.
July 23, 2009 at 4:41 am
Hi
I use the idera product.
IMO it is one of the good one's. Plus it has a number of other tools that are extremely useful (SQL Safe - backup compression/encrpt).
- It has excellent reporting features that can been published to SSRS.
- Current activity for reviewing sessions/blocking etc.
- Trace individual sessions.
- Alert notification on the most common Windows/SQL WMI counters (custom ones can also be created).
- Index stats with the option to rebuild (if you not manage that already).
Plus many more....
Im not a Idera employee before you ask 😉
JL
July 23, 2009 at 7:37 am
sqlrumble (7/23/2009)
Hello,I've looked around but was unable to find recent comparisson reviews off SQL Monitoring Software.
I've been asked to review SQL Server Monitoring software. Our instances are a mixture of SQL 2000, 2005, 2008. We are also shortly looking to virtualise some of the instances. I'm looking at software which will monitor our instances i.e. (CPU, Memory, I/O, blocking, Cluster, disk space etc) and alert us based upon certain thresholds.
I was wondering if anyone had recently reviewed or could point me to any reviews? I'd also like to hear from anyone with experience of the following products and what they thought of them?
Idera - Diagnostic Manager
Red Gate - SQL Response
Quest - Spotlight.
If there any others worth looking at, i'd appreiciate if you could let me know.
Many Thanks
Another that you don't have listed, Microsoft Operations Manager. We use that in combination with Idera Diagnostic Manager. OM works very well for monitoring the physical box and the SQL Server instance, but it's not so good at monitoring internals (although you can, and I have, create custom monitors to get at the internals). Idera's DM was much better at getting to the guts inside SQL Server. I especially like how it captures query performance metrics & stores them for us.
I've evaluated the other two. Red Gate's product was very lightweight, quick and pretty complete. It's very good with alerts. It didn't store the kind of history that we needed and while I could have customized some type of datamart to keep the data that it collected, it wanted to buy a product, not build one.
Quest's Spotlight isn't really a monitoring tool. It's a diagnostic tool. For monitoring you want Quest Foglight. We ran it in house for about three years. Our experience with it was not good. It was very slow, processor intensive, it caused problems on our production boxes, it crashed regularly, we had large holes in the data collected, and we didn't find the company to be terribly responsive.
I also evaluated SQL Sentry. It's a good tool set. It just didn't quite meet what we were looking for at the time. Idera's tool did a better job with query monitoring when I did the eval. SQL Sentry was a bit bigger & more comprehensive, but since we already had OM doing a major part of the work, Idera's DM made more sense.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
July 23, 2009 at 8:30 am
a colleague of mine has reviewed a few monitoring tools back last year and wrote an article on it...
His article can be found here:
http://www.gre-sqlserver-solutions.com/MonitoringTools.html
Hope it helps
Gethyn Elliswww.gethynellis.com
July 23, 2009 at 9:12 am
GRE (7/23/2009)
a colleague of mine has reviewed a few monitoring tools back last year and wrote an article on it...His article can be found here:
http://www.gre-sqlserver-solutions.com/MonitoringTools.html
Hope it helps
GRE: Nice to see someone out there agrees with me. Idera is a quality product..
If you go for this then dont to it online, it you spend 20 -30 mins speaking with an account manager then you can haggle on price. Plus I got the "non-production" servers (i.e. dev/qa/stage) @ half price.
Its always good to have a little banter with the AM's, as they can help you save in the long run.
July 23, 2009 at 9:33 am
I work for Red Gate, so I'll mention Response. I wasn't thrilled early on with the way it worked, but I think that's because I was looking for something else. However it does monitor/alert, and they are working on a new version based on customer enhancements.
Quest - I used these tools with Oracle/DB2, and they worked well. The SQL ones should be very similar. But they were fat, big, slow clients that required a lot of bandwidth in our use. Not great over VPN at home.
Idera, I haven't heard much one way or the other.
BMC Patrol/HP Openview/CA Unicenter - Overkill, IMHO, and $$$
I know there are smaller tools (What's Up, etc.) that might work.
Lots of data is in the system views as well if you want to write your own.
July 23, 2009 at 9:42 am
I also like Idera's Diagnostic Manager. Wish I had it at my new job.
I think the newer version of WhatsUpGold has quite a bit of server monitoring capability, but might not include some SQL specific features such as "longest running queries" that can be useful.
I always suggest getting free trials from the various vendors and trying them out. Everyone has different needs, so find what works best for you. Most vendors will extend the trial a bit if you need more time to evaluate.
July 23, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Wow, thanks for all the responses, suggestions, links etc. I really apprieciate it.
Idera certainly sounds like it is one of the main contenders, from what I've seen so far I'm quite impressed with it.
Steve - how far are red gate from releasing the new version? Could you give us a heads up on any new functionality?
I'll post some details on my findings here in the coming weeks.
Thanks again all.
😀
July 24, 2009 at 1:53 am
SQLRumble,
I just wanted to voice my support for SQL Sentry. We have been testing/using it for the past few months and will be installing it here. I found the GUI to be very intuitive and clean. It basically collects the same data as Idera et al, but I found the overall feel of SQL Sentry to be better.
Performance Advisor is an add-on to the monitoring tool and provides some great metrics which really help you find any problems.
As I said, both are good tools with very similar offerings, it is just the "packaging" that you consider.
Regards,
WilliamD
July 24, 2009 at 6:47 am
Running SQL Spotlight. I like that you can define what to get notified on, create custom queries, and also how you can go back in time through the historical statistics and show a point in time how the server was running and what killed performance after the fact.
They've also released new versions lately will new features -- definitely worth checking out.
July 24, 2009 at 7:11 am
jamie (7/24/2009)
Running SQL Spotlight. I like that you can define what to get notified on, create custom queries, and also how you can go back in time through the historical statistics and show a point in time how the server was running and what killed performance after the fact.They've also released new versions lately will new features -- definitely worth checking out.
This can also be done with SQLdm (Idera). You can set what the thresholds are for "Warnings" and "Critical". All the information that is shown on the "Real-Time" view is also available historically
July 24, 2009 at 9:42 am
we went though a similar exercise a few mths ago. I liked Foglight but as ppl on here have said, it was way way too slow for production use. If you had an issue and the managers were wanting to know what was causing the go slow, it could take up to 5mins to get the results from what you've clicked. Idera was ok, i did like the fragmentation notification but as a whole i thought it was a bit lightweight as it seemed to take 1min snapshots as opposed to constant monitoring. We went for SQL Sentry in the end, very quick and easy to use. Highlight the spike, right click and select top sql - simple!!! Only down side is that the reporting side of it is very disappointing as opposed to Foglight.
I recommend trialing each of them and see which one meets your needs as each company / person has different views on what they want from these products, hence why they're all different. They each have their good and bad features but what i wanted was a bit from each of them slapped into one but life aint that simple :hehe:
_________________________________________________________________________________SQLGeordieWeb:- Jarrin ConsultancyBlog:- www.chrisjarrintaylor.co.ukTwitter:- @SQLGeordie
July 24, 2009 at 10:41 am
I work for a company called SQLAlert that produces a lightweight monitoring product of the same name. The product runs stand-alone on one-or-more servers with load balancing and failover. You can download a desktop verion for free that has MOST of the features.
$0.02
Greg
😉
July 24, 2009 at 11:00 am
gregory.hill (7/24/2009)
I work for a company called SQLAlert that produces a lightweight monitoring product of the same name. The product runs stand-alone on one-or-more servers with load balancing and failover. You can download a desktop verion for free that has MOST of the features.$0.02
Greg
😉
Website not pretty in Mozilla 😉
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