Best 3rd party management tools?

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Best 3rd party management tools?

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Chris Metzger Ten Centuries Points: 1268 More actions · Answer 1

MysteryJimbo (11/23/2011)
I went the opposite way when I did my product assestment.
I found Spotlight is pretty (impressive for management) but too full of fluff and not intuitive to use.
Idera Diagnostic manager is very similar in layout to Outlook and is easy to pick up and use. Especially with junior users and new employees

Does Idera do more than SQL monitoring? Does it also do backup compression? What about monitoring other servers? Do you have a ballpark cost? I can look into it I guess but I don't want to start picking too many options and then get overwhelmed with testing too many choices - I don't have that kind of free time and need to pick something sooner vs later (I would rather have a choice made before the platform goes online).

Ant-Green SSC Guru Points: 113445 More actions · Answer 2

Idera is more expensive than Quest

Idera pricing per server for Diagnostic Manager for SQL (20% maintenance charge each year after)

Lic & 1 Yr Maintenance - £1620

Lic & 2 Yr Maintenance - £1876.50

Lic & 3 Yr Maintenance - £2133

Quest pricing per server for Spotlight (20% maintenance charge each year after)

1 Licence inc 1 Yr Support – £1,487

1 Licence inc 2 Yr Support – £1,755

1 Licence inc 3 Yr Support – £1,993

Red-Gate pricing for SQL Monitor per server (25% maintenance charge each year after)

Lic & 1 Year Maint - £606.00

Lic & 2 Year Maint - £727.00

Lic & 3 Year Maint - £848.00

This is a quote from Ben Allen @ Idera

No, we can’t monitor just the servers, it has to connect to a SQL Server engine first.
We have another tool that would be able to monitor your windows file server – SharePoint Diagnostic Manager.

Idera have a product called SQL Safe Backup which is their backup software, unsure on the price of this

MysteryJimbo SSC-Insane Points: 24203 More actions · Answer 3

SQL Server only from the Idera offering and that was around £3000 a licence.

With Spotlight, from what I remember, to monitor anything useful other than sql you needed to buy another licence anyway.

Ant-Green SSC Guru Points: 113445 More actions · Answer 4

This is a quote from Richard Jones @ Quest

Hi Anthony, yes you do still get windows instances for free with SoSSE

Chris Metzger Ten Centuries Points: 1268 More actions · Answer 5

So it looks like about 3x the price to use Idera vs RedGate. I mean I don't mind paying more but not that much more. If the Quest is 2x the price but I get to monitor 20x the number of servers then that seems like the better deal to me. Yes it's one thing to pick the best-in-class product but it's another to choose the next in line and save a ton of money. I can push only so far on the cost then I have to eat dirt - so the Quest is still reasonable enough when you spread it out across all servers instead of just SQL (even vs RedGate it's actually cheaper per server because I can include the app servers in the count for Quest).

Thanks for the info - I think I'll stick with the original recommendation for now and do some testing of RedGate vs Quest and then re-recommend based on that trial. I'm hoping the Quest works out and I can monitor all of my servers and be done - that would be totally sweet.

Ant-Green SSC Guru Points: 113445 More actions · Answer 6

take a look at the custom counters part of spotlight this is a powerful part of the app as it allows you to write your own metrics

if your clued up on WMI queries then all the better,

we had a mixture of Sybase ASA and SQL at the old place, but there where no tools to monitor ASA so we wrote our own queries and used Spotlight for it.

one was to see if the service was up so a query like

SELECT started FROM WIN32_Service WHERE NAME = 'SybaseASA' in WMI would return a value, and you could then set alerts based on that value it returns, so would be one to look at for the IIS service etc.

if you need any help with Spotlight, send me a private message, I'm running it and could help should you have any issues.

edit

try and find scriptomatic from Microsoft, its a little app that does WMI queries, but not in the format needed for spotlight, but gets all the classes(tables) and column headers to help you write WMI

Chris Metzger Ten Centuries Points: 1268 More actions · Answer 7

Oh that's AWESOME! On the Termservs there will be Progress databases so this would also let me monitor those databases and make sure the service was at least running for ProControl. Yes I will keep you in mind - thanks!!