January 11, 2011 at 10:52 am
Hi all,
I would like your input, especially if you have used both tools, on Red Gates SQL Monitor (formerly SQL Response) and Quests Performance Analysis for SQL Server.
What are cons/pros for each? I have tested Quests offering and now looking at Red Gates but would like some outside opinions.
Thanks!
January 11, 2011 at 11:11 am
if you have the budget for the Quest tool, you should be shopping for either Ideras Diagnostic Manager or Ignite for SQL Server by Confio.....
The red gate tool is great for the cost. However, it is not as robust as the other tools listed above..
that said, what are you basic needs?
if you want to only monitor your servers, the red gate tool is the best.
if you want deep SQL analysis with historical data and more bells and whistles than you know what do to with AND you have the money, go with the others.
January 11, 2011 at 11:21 am
I would have to agree. I used the attached matrix to help with my selection. Idera, SQLSentry and Oracle rose to the top for the features I was looking for.
Personally, I would use a product like Red Gates SQL Monitor before I built my own and it's at a nice cost point. However, based on your budget and the features you are looking for you may be better off with one of the other products.
January 11, 2011 at 11:39 am
Geoff, my main concern is not necessairly immediate monitoring but performance analysis over time. I want to be able to consolidate some of my SQL servers and I need good performance indicators over time that it is a wise choice to do so. Looks like I have a couple of other products to add to my evaluation list, thanks.
January 11, 2011 at 11:46 am
Geoff and Carlton gave very good recommendations. I'd go with Idera SQL Diagnostic Manager.
Thank You,
Best Regards,
SQLBuddy
January 11, 2011 at 3:53 pm
if you are looking to consolidate your servers then a good pointer is the amount if IO activity per database so use dmv sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats to track those values.
It's a no cost feature too!
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January 12, 2011 at 3:08 am
Hi - I work for Red Gate (and work on SQL Monitor), so have an obvious bias here (and am certainly not an outside opinion!), but just thought I'd add in a few more details regarding the SQL Monitor product, which will hopefully help you weigh up the different options available to you.
Firstly, I've made a few additions to the spreadsheet very kindly posted by Carlton B Ramsey. There are a few areas of functionality that are in the product, not listed on the spreadsheet for SQL Monitor:
1) Switch from real-time to historical data - there is a button in the top-right of every Overview that allows you to Rewind Time to any previous point (for which you have collected data, of course) and view the status of the metrics on a server at that particular point in time.
2) Enable trace via tool - this can be found under Configuration -> Trace (second option on Configuration page)
3) Expert advice - every alert and metric has associated information and advice to help the user understand what he or she is seeing and understand what sort of values to expect and what else to look for. In particular, if you select a specific metric on the Analysis page, information about that metric can be found on the right hand side of the display.
4) SQL Server Blocking - the tool includes a "Blocked Process" alert. For a full list of alerts, go to http://www.red-gate.com/supportcenter/Content?p=SQL%20Monitor&c=SQL_Monitor/help/2.0/SM_AlertsList.htm&toc=SQL_Monitor/help/2.0/toc1269920.htm
5) SQL Server Deadlocks - as above, there is an alert to detect deadlocks.
There are also a few areas that we're developing for v2.2, due out in 2011Q2, including showing more information about problem queries and monitoring replication and mirroring.
Also, of course, there are a few areas where SQL Monitor really excels, for example allowing you to monitor servers from a mobile device (so that you can really keep an eye on problems away from the office), polling with high frequency (so that you know you're finding problems ASAP) and so on, but it's up to you of course, to decide what's important for you.
A final point on performance analysis over time - the Analysis section should allow you to do this but, in addition, we're going to be releasing a set of example SSRS reports soon, that will allow you to carry out more in-depth management of servers via SSRS.
Hope this helps!
Ben Rees
Red Gate Software
January 13, 2011 at 1:42 am
I currently use Quest's spotlight as the main monitoring tool. We're currently in the middle of a proof of concept for Foglight and Performance Analysis (both front end and back).
Spotlight does a large amount for us (along with DMV's and such like), but PA seems very good. However, Quest are apparently trying to move everything into Foglight and are looking to deprecate Spotlight at some point (no dates mentioned yet). This may also apply to PA which is tied in to Foglight. It's worth checking this.
I'm not sure on the granularity at the moment when mixed with nHibernate. We generate all sorts of queries (with poor plan re-use if I'm honest) and it doesn't give me what I need from there to assess things properly. For SP use, it seems good.
One of the major concerns I have is that Foglight is more a collection of technologies that they have gathered together and it doesn't feel mature enough to me at this stage. It does look like it will get that way, but at the moment I'm struggling to see the benefit of swapping over. The UI for Foglight is pretty poor and there are definite bugs in it's alerts (such as telling me files are growing when they are not). Foglight (for us) has/had potential due to covering our app servers too.
I've not fully looked at Redgate's solution, but will do in due course. I use the Toolbelt and find it essential and their tools are robust and I am a fan.
January 14, 2011 at 8:48 am
chrisph (1/11/2011)
Geoff, my main concern is not necessairly immediate monitoring but performance analysis over time. I want to be able to consolidate some of my SQL servers and I need good performance indicators over time that it is a wise choice to do so. Looks like I have a couple of other products to add to my evaluation list, thanks.
For THAT primary purpose I recommend either SQL Sentry's Performance Advisor or Confio's Ignite.
Best,
Kevin G. Boles
SQL Server Consultant
SQL MVP 2007-2012
TheSQLGuru on googles mail service
January 16, 2011 at 11:40 am
Full disclosure: I work for SQL Sentry. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to work for a company whose products I believed so strongly in, and whose people I've always admired. So I may be biased, but I would suggest that - especially for historical analysis - Performance Advisor is going to be tough to beat. Along with all the other standard metrics, with 6.0 we will even capture plans over time, so you can see how they change and how this directly affects performance.
I'm not going to try and convince you that you'll like it best, but I feel that you'll be doing yourself a disservice if you don't include it in your evaluation. If you have any specific questions about features, or how to accomplish analysis for x, y, or z, please don't hesitate to e-mail me (abertrand AT sqlsentry DOT net) or visit our support forum at http://forum.sqlsentry.net/
Cheers,
Aaron
January 18, 2011 at 8:16 am
I would like to thank everyone for the great feedback on this thread.
The original matrix I posted was created from a quick review of what I found when I did my review of products that are available. The review consisted of looking at the marketing material I could find on the various products as a way not narrow my product search.
That being said. I appreciate the updates made to the matrix from red gate to show fetures that will be added to there next release of the software. Also, I did not include price on purpose for the matrix because I did not want price to be the driving factor for my product selection. That being said. The more features you get the more expensive the tool will be.
It was brought to my attention that some other features where missing with this matrix. I was debating on updating the matrix. Instead, I'm going to include them with this post.
Features missing for SQL Sentry
Performance Reporting: A wealth of performance reporting options are available in the Reports menu in the SQL Sentry Console.
Monitoring Log Shipping: We have a whitepaper that covers this feature in detail: http://www.sqlsentry.net/white-paper/log-shipping-and-replication.asp Jason Hall, one of our team members has a post in his blog expanding upon the basic functionality to include monitoring and alerting based on latency: http://jasonhall.blogs.sqlsentry.net/2010/09/monitoring-replication-latency-with-sql.html.
Monitoring Database Mirroring: Mirroring can be monitored in the same fashion as outlined in the log shipping whitepaper.
Agentless Installation: SQL Sentry does not require any agents on the monitored servers. The SQL Sentry Server Service uses a lightweight polling architecture to collect data from the monitored servers. One of the original reasons for developing the Performance Advisor part of the SQL Sentry product line was that after evaluating many of the monitoring tools on that list, we were unhappy with the overhead they placed on our monitored servers.
Baselining: Our reporting and historical views can do baselining and long term trend analysis for nearly everything that SQL Sentry monitors. We even provide runtime graphs for individual jobs, reports, queries, etc.
Custom Monitoring: While our dashboard view is not customizable, SQL Sentry can monitor any counter in the perfmon library. Here is a KB article explaining how this is done: http://forum.sqlsentry.net/topic1856-setting-up-automated-performance-alerting-in-sql-sentry-event-manager.aspx.
There are also several features unique to SQL Sentry that do not appear on the spreadsheet at all, such as execution plan analysis, automated response to alert conditions beyond simple notification, and job chaining.
Thanks again everyone for the feedback.
January 28, 2011 at 7:34 am
As what seems like the only vendor to not chime in yet, I'll throw my hat in. I work for Quest, and given the requirements you've laid out (server consolidation, historical analysis, trending, etc...) You are right on track with Performance Analysis for SQL Server. PA (for short) provides long term query analytics over time and also provides dimensional analysis which allows you to see over time how individual databases/applications/users/queries/stored procs/etc... are trending. Comparisons are also built in allowing you to compare database A this week to last week, Query B today versus the same day last year, etc... which is extremely helpful in looking for performance trends.
Let me know if you have any questions, I'd be happy to help out. If you haven't seen a web demo yet, I highly recommend you sit in on one.
January 28, 2011 at 8:06 am
Carlton B Ramsey (1/11/2011)
I would have to agree. I used the attached matrix to help with my selection. Idera, SQLSentry and Oracle rose to the top for the features I was looking for.Personally, I would use a product like Red Gates SQL Monitor before I built my own and it's at a nice cost point. However, based on your budget and the features you are looking for you may be better off with one of the other products.
Carlton - I don't work for SQL Sentry but am very familiar with their product. The spreadsheet that you assembled is not completely accurate in that I believe you left off some of the capabilities that are there, in fact many in looking at it.
One other note, I don't know that any other product has the Event Manager view that is really a critical component which IMO sets SQL Sentry apart presently as well as the disk utilization view, and some of the recent additions including the execution plan viewer that was incorporated with the Performance tool. All good stuff.
...and their reports are pretty nice too.
They are smaller and growing but they definitely provide a great tool.
Yes, this was free.... 😛
David
@SQLTentmaker“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose” - Jim Elliot
January 6, 2012 at 10:04 am
Actually I'm in a shopping a new performance monitoring tool like you. I've been using IDERA SQL Dm (Diagnostics Monitor) for around 3 years.
But it's not that much intuitive and lack of help resources or guides.
Even IDERA support engineer sometime didn't explain about their own performance report counters!
There are pros/cons and upside/downside for each tool, but I found a lot more granular detail performance view in Quest Foglight PA. It looks really helpful.
So thinking about using both tools for PROD SQL Servers.. IDERA is good for enterprise level monitoring & alerting, Foglight for in depth detail tunning & isolating issue purpose..
April 25, 2016 at 4:44 pm
We are also evaluating monitoring tools. We currently use Dell Spotlight. Can you share what features you found in Foglight that helped you with "in depth detail tuning & isolating issue purpose..".
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