TechValidate Research on SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

“DPA is much easier to use and far more effective than the other tools I’ve used.”

“I can find both the root cause of problems and solutions a whole lot faster than before. This has allowed us to move on to other priorities and get more done.”

“A great performance monitoring and reporting tool with minimal DB impact.”

“[DPA] can quickly drill into the issue and show the DBA where to focus on a performance issue…and it can do it within minutes. Previously we have to run the WAIT Stats analysis using SSMS and use home grown methods to get pointed in the right direction. With DPA the same analysis and much more is available within a few clicks. Plus the historical data analysis is invaluable.”

“We’ve been able to do more with less as well as troubleshoot issues BEFORE the client sees it. Keeping the customer happy!”

“One of the best and most intuitive database performance tools on the market.”

“[DPA] allows us to search through performance history of our systems to find query’s/applications that need to be tuned or improved.”

“[DPA is] great tool to help identify the processes that are taking too long and are impacting our performance.”

“We downloaded a trial version and were able to identify and quickly resolve performance issues. The ease of use and ability to rename the queries are excellent!”

“Ignite allows me to quickly respond to issues that arise. But, the historical information gives me a chance to take preventative measures before things get out of control.”

“I love this product! You will easily and quickly understand the activity in your databases. You will be able to address problems before the end-users become aware of them.”

“We needed to find a performance monitoring solution for our Oracle database instance that was less expensive than Oracle Enterprise Manager.”

“We really like the user interface and think it’s better than the competition. We liked the idea of buying a vendor solution rather than “rolling our own” performance collector and having to support it constantly. DPA has been pretty much maintenance free which is important to us."

“We needed to get metrics that both VMWare admins and DBAs could view in order to resolve performance problems and get to the root cause of issues instead of speculation and finger-pointing.”

“Solarwinds DPA was the only tool of its kind available that monitored both the hypervisor and the guest OS and allowed visibility into what other factors are impacting the virtual database servers. Before this, we had no method of proving that issues were query related as opposed to virtual hardware related.”

“DBAs and VM admins can now collaborate to resolve issues in a smoother manner. Reduced the amount of finger pointing and instead let us focus on resolving the issues.”

“[DPA is easy to] use. It has a single interface for all databases (Oracle, SQL Server, etc).”

“We like the single interface into all our database environments. Most other products in the arena are vendor-specific. It was also VERY easy and quick to install…unlike, say, OEM and its’ agent-based architecture.”

“If describing SolarWinds DPA to a colleague, we would say it has a very cool, intuitive interface that makes it easy to find wait issues in the database.”

“[DPA] provides the ability to see historical execution to help track problems that occurred.”

“[We needed]a better tool to monitor the activity on our SQL Server than what was offered out of the box.”

“Gives historical and real-time information as to what is going in our database. We didn’t really look at any other options.”

“The biggest benefit has been that we have been able to pinpoint extremely poor performance on a couple of vendor applications to be due to poor application programming practices.”

“SolarWinds DPA is a great product and I would recommend purchasing it if your budget allows it.”

“[DPA is] simple to use and install. There are [many] reports and [they are] very accurate.”

“[DPA lets us] drill down directly to the problem. In one instance, it was just a couple of indexes which were identified by a drilldown into a SP’s query plan.”

“We needed to know more about what was going on inside of our SQL database. DPA allowed us that capability.”

“DPA gives a deeper dive into the metrics, [and] that allow us to make chioices on what best can be done around performance. The data can also be presented to clients in the native information as produced.”

“I’ve used several SQL monitoring software in the past. I still needed to delve deeper into SQL WAITs. Ignite’s ability to assign specific WAITs to resources for each of the queries was very useful. Drilling through SQL, OS, VM, and storage is the most useful tool to diagnose performance issues within SQL. This dramatically helped to quickly analyze bottlenecks and even increased IT intra-teams collaboration.”

“[I appreciate the] ability to drill through performance issues and identify source of problem. This can be daunting task in a virtualized environment with many hosts, multiple SANs, and hybrid networks (iSCSI, Fiber).”

“The vendor that we have for our line of business application always pointed fingers at our network, and this (DPA) has allowed us to show them it was queries in their SQL database causing the issue.”

“Before purchasing Ignite, I tried three other vendors’ tools for two weeks each. The fact that we purchased Ignite over the products from RedGate, Dell (formerly Quest Software) and Idera should speak volumes.”

“SolarWinds DPA provides more user driven and friendly graphs to drill down to details of events.”

“I got tired of developers telling my machines were running slowly.”

“The user interface is very intuitive across database platforms.”

“I had used DPA in a previous job and when I joined my current employer they were looking for ways to improve performance. There just isn’t a better tool the DPA”

“DPA is more intuitive and easier to provide role based access and even share information by emailing direct from the analysis of the queries.”

“My previous experience with Ignite was in a similarly high-loaded transactional environment. Ignite was essential in diagnosing bottlenecks in data layers.”

“It tracks usage and pinpoints causes of problems in ways that I can’t image we would be able to determine with any other tools. Built-in SQL Server tools like profiler and query plan analysis would not be able to replace the view that DPA gives us.”

“The need to monitor and set alerts on multiple DBMS platforms including Sybase. At the time we were relying on home grown scripts running from multiple hosts. We were tasked of coming up with a universal tool to do it all.”

“We analyzed all the products in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and Ignite proved to be the best match for our goals.”

“Oracle’s tuning and diagnostic pack was outrageously expensive. Ignite was deliciously simple, useful and a steal at that price!”

“Because Ignite stores this information in a repository outside of the target database, it makes analyzing and looking at history independent of the database you are looking at.”

“I have used Ignite in past positions with other firms and have always liked its useability and performance monitoring capabilities and introduced it to my current work place.”

“It is a much more intuitive method of resolving problems.”

“We needed to have real-time and some historical insight into our Oracle SE databases that we could not get from Oracle due to the licensing restrictions on their diagnostics and tuning packs that require EE. The historical analysis was the big draw after being impressed by the free real-time capabilities. It is great to be able to generate performance trends to management or development teams.”

“It is much easier for me to identify problem SQL statements with DPA versus looking at a page full of seemingly useless numbers in a statspack report.”

“We were looking for a uniform tool across as many of our DBMS platforms as possible. We were looking for a tool that not only gathers data but will provide a resolution set for performance issues. We had been in contract negotiations with (competitor) when we came across the DPA product. While (competitor) had an advantage over DPA in only 1 category – number of DBMS’ their tool supported; DPA won in the end because of its ability to provide a solution recommendation. The (competitor) product still relied on the experience of the DBA to interpret the data being presented. As we are running on a DBA resource pool going forward, DPA will allow the DBA managers to review solutions without being an SME in a specific DBMS platform, and assign resolution work to specific DBMS DBAs.”

“Like (competitor), DPA gathers data from all parts of the server..IO, memory, SQL etc. The difference is DPA analyzes the data and makes recommendations. The competition does not, therefore it still relies on the experience of the DBA to interpret the data and make a change. With the competition performance resolution would vary from DBA to DBA. DPA takes the experience and human element out of the question.”

“We purchased SolarWinds DPA for its ability to monitor performance of Oracle Standard Edition databases.”

“Hands down, DPA is the best tool I’ve ever used for Oracle database monitoring.”

“We purchased SolarWinds DPA for the graphical presentation and ease of use.”

“SolarWinds’ graphical interface is easy to present to non-DBAs, and being browser-based is a big help for sharing in the short term. The ease of administration and its self-maintenance archiving is really convenient.”

“We purchased SolarWinds DPA on the recommendation of colleague when he learned we needed insights into poor SQL performance.”

“SolarWinds DPA’s focus on wait types is unique. The UI is clean, less cluttered and confusing than other tools I’ve evaluated. Less of a footprint on the monitored servers.”

“We purchased SolarWinds DPA because we were experiencing frequent application performance issues that were directly linked to the database,”

“SolarWinds DPA is faster and easier [than alternative tools].”