SolarWinds Database Observability Reviews & Product Details

The amount of information given to you in one place. They make it easy to track down the issue at hand. You need need to do any other queries for trying to find the issue you have. Bring up Solarwinds DPA and you can get all the information you need. There is even a new feature that you can use DPA information and show it along side information from other modules so you have data to compare at a particular time frame. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Is there something I should dislike? The Solarwinds interface can be slow at times and I know there are ways to make it more responsive but have not gotten to optimization yet. Sometimes there can be an overwhelming amount of data. They do a really good job at delivering you anything and everything you need, just need the time to sort it all out. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that you are able to see everything involved with the databases. It is very easy to see what queries are taking the most time and you can see the exact query that is being executed. It is easy to setup and you can get monitoring going very quickly. The performance of the actual DPA application is very fast. Upgrades are very quick as well. They usually only take about 20 minutes. It supports all common DB languages. A wizard allows the adding of database instances very quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The product needs more integration into the Orion platform, especially for reporting. It would be nice if the alerts and reporting were setup like the Orion platform. This product was purchased by SolarWinds and does not yet have the same feel as the Orion platform. I am sure this is on the radar and will take time. I would also like to customize the charts more that are pulled from DPA, in the Orion interface. It also needs to have some sort of agentless monitoring. The cost can be significant when monitoring a lot of instances. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Anyone can easily understand even if they are seeing Database parameters for first time like SQL queries Transaction time, Table Locks and tools from Solarwinds are much easier to operate than any other tools.

The new feature introduced in latest releases "Correlation of metrics" is most helpful and easier to find what is causing the issues. can drill down to blocked SQL Server queries to discover why the database server blocked them.Monitoring expensive queries lets you see poorly written queries, queries that take too long to respond, queries affected by CPU time, efficient queries that are delayed by slower queries.

Multi-Dimensional Performance Analysis makes me troubleshooting simple.

Gained time to focus on more important or strategic parts of my job. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is no negative feedback on Solarwinds Modules except the license part. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Drill down into your SQL Server database to pinpoint the root cause of poor performance.

When a SQL Server database instance includes Availability Groups (AGs), the DPA homepage provides the following information:

The AG status icon AG_status_icons.png identifies database instances that include AGs. The color of the dot indicates the AG status.

An AG status summary box shows the number of database instances with partially healthy or unhealthy AGs. As with other status summary boxes, click the filter next to a status to display only those instances.

AG_filter.png

When you drill in to a database instance that includes AGs, click the AG Status tab to see the status of AGs, databases, and replicas, including synchronization and failover status information. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

wrong parsed query in mysql slave

Alerting needs to be more crisp

Custom Report for Resources for a Program in DPA

Automatic exporting for DPA logs should be added into newer versions Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ease of use for non-DBAs and constant improvements to the platform. The product as a whole is very easy to implement in large-scale environments and the current roadmap is following the industry trend of moving relational databases to the cloud (aka, Amazon RDS, etc.) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lack of a customizable reporting engine to create reports for external stakeholders. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love the query advice tab. It is great to have specific issues highlighted and ready for review. The real-time tab is always useful for our help desk team. Solarwinds Thwack user community is full of amazing resources and tips for getting the most out of your DPA install. You really can't say enough about Solarwinds' after install support for their products. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I dislike that we only have a single instance licensed. We regularly repoint DPA to whatever database is generating users calls. It'd be much better if we were able to monitor all of our databases at once. Management consistently balks at the cost of additional licensing (this seems to be a regular concern with our Solarwinds products). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We've been using DPA for a couple of years now for our production Oracle instances. It's been incredibly valuable. Within a couple of weeks of installation, we were able to identify and correct an issue with some reporting that had been plaguing us for months. Even though we have and use Grid Control on a daily basis, without that additional wait info that DPA brought to the table we could not nail down the source of the problem. We now use it for our production MS Sql Server and MySQL instances and our DBAs are in it all day making sure everything is running well and identifying and quickly addressing issues that we see. Fantastic tool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

After 2 years, I can't say I've found anything that I wish it did that it doesn't already do. Great tool, and the price is outstanding compared to competing products. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We purchased Confio Ignite (now DPA) as it was called back, hoping to alleviate the time taken when performance issues occurred. Due to budget constraints, we have only one SQL Server DBA which was borderline OK as far as workloads go. However, we would fall behind whenever performance issues popped up or when troubleshooting needed to take place. DPA has worked wonders for our DBA and enables him to rapidly pinpoint where the performance issue is with a SQL Server database. We have also started to use DPA to provide alerts when things are not 100% OK in our SQL Server environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The graphs showing top SQL statements and top waits, etc. are difficult to interpret because the colors used in the bar graphs are shades of the same color. It is often difficult to distinguish between the shades to determine which queries are the top offenders when the shades of red or green or blue are so close together. Note that this is not the case when you log in to look at details. However, the high level charts in emails are difficult to make out. I feel I should not have to log in to be able to make out the details - I am busy enough as it is. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ability to drill down on queries and to download reports with graphs for management. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is still difficult to explain to management that it is NOT the network. The graphs have helped substantially; I wish that there were a "view for dummies" !! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

DPA is intuitive. Fresh interface and very easy to. I like that DPA gives me more root causes of database performance issues . Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Yet, I don't have something to dislike . Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.