October 26, 2009 at 12:52 pm
I am evaluating Quest Spotlight and Idera DM right now. Am I missing another tool? I am looking for a tool that will show me where my bottlenecks are in SQL 2005 and eventually SQL 2008. Right now aside from activity monitor and dmv's I don't have any insight. What is everyone's opinion?
I am an Oracle DBA who is seeking something VERY similar to Oracle Enterprise Manager but for the sql 2005 world. Thanks
October 26, 2009 at 2:14 pm
I generally use performance monitor and traces for that kind of thing. Haven't bothered with a commercial tool.
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October 27, 2009 at 6:25 am
I'm not sure I'd compare Spotlight & Diagnostic Manager directly. Yes, both show you real time measurements of server performance, but DM also keeps historical information so that you can do trending and analysis. You'd need Quest Foglight to do the same thing.
Both are monitoring tools, but not good for manipulation and management. Also, both are just looking at information you can get yourself through perfmon, dmv's and server side trace events, which is what these tools use to gather things and present them to you.
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October 27, 2009 at 2:56 pm
DBArtisan.
We run Oracle, Sybase and SQL Server in our shop; DBArtisan makes our lives easier in each one of the three environments.
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Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.October 28, 2009 at 9:01 am
I can tell you I have used the Quest Spotlight for SQL Server and find it a bit of a pain to deal with at times. We have the following problems on a regular basis
1. We often find if the service restarts, all the connections we have need to be touched again to continue monitoring.
2. Adding exceptions for the monitoring is not very flexible
3. We are using it for monitoring SQL Servers in multiple domains. We often have issues maintaining metrics on servers in the second domain
4. We are often bombarded with old stale alerts when the service restarts.
Personally, I prefer the monitoring tool from Embarcadero to Quest Spotlight. It seemed to require less intervention on our part and it seemed a little more flexible.
October 28, 2009 at 11:28 am
Been using Idera SQL DM for a long time now and I'm pretty happy with it.
The "History Browser" feature (available from version 5.5 onwards) is really useful for answering those "What was happening on the server at 1:37am last night?" type questions.
Alerting works well, and with a bit of imagination you can write your own custom alerts for things which SQL DM doesn't cover.
The trend analysis is reasonable and answers "Tell me when I need to think about adding more disk space" type questions.
The reporting is pretty good too.
You could do worse than take a look.
October 28, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Check out the tools from OpNet Technologies. Useful info for application and network layers when the finger pointing starts.
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