Idera software (any good)
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Hello everyone,
I have a quick question if I may. Has anyone had experience using Idera's SQL diagnostic manager software? Is it any good? Any problems with it? Are the performance metrics it gathers useful to you to troubleshoot problems?
Just asking because we are considering purchasing it.
Thanks
Jerry
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I'm using it currently and it's in my top 5 tools, all time.
The setup is very simple and basic, it captures and reports relevant information, shows it graphically which is great. Only downside currently is that you can only monitor from a single machine. I've had a few meetings with the tech and sales folks at Idera as we were looking at purchasing SQL Safe and we went through the product roadmap for DM.
The next version is due out real soon, which will support multiple users being able to run a console which pulls data from the central server.
The version after that will support snmp, which will be great for advanced notification (on top of the paging/email/event log alerts that it runs now).
Given the price tag, the wealth of information (index defrag stats, table growth stats, cpu, i/o, process monitoring as well as being able to view the worst performing queries, procs within a given timeframe filtered by login/db etc) and the ease of use, I'd highly recommend it.
Oh and in case you have problems, the tech support staff are first rate.
BTW, I'm not associated with Idera, and are getting no kickbacks for this.
Just hang for the new version to trial if you can, it could be worth the wait.
Nic
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I dont know if you are from Idera and trying to get feedback from the user community about DM
Earlier we had to keep NetIQ DM running on our machines all the time so that it could gather stats, but nowit runs as a service and the interface is much improved and very sophisticated. We had to run all kinds of DBCC commands to get informations from SQL Server, but DM has made it very easy.
Hope this helps.
Thanks.
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You must have the updated version. Gonna have to make some calls and get me that.
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No I'm not from Idera. We are looking for diagnosing and trending tools where I work and Idera is one of the companies we are looking at. The reason I ask is we are kind of suspicious about the low price when compared to the other companies.
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I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that they are a relative newcomer into the market and trying to build a strong customer base.
Take Imceda as an example, really Litespeed is the definitive backup solution, however earlier this year they jacked up the prices immensely. Idera say that they are not going to do this, however you never know. A good portion of their staff have worked the Imceda/Quest route and so have an idea as to where they stand.
I believe that right now they could well play a major role in small to medium companies who don't have the big bucks to spend on a Quest tool. If they are able to leverage the market that way then it's a massive potential customer base they are looking at.
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We tested it out here, and it was good (particularly given its price point) - we even spied out what seemed to be a problem pretty quickly upon using the demo. However, we ultimately decided against it for a couple of reasons:
1 - the CPU meter would eventually walk itself off the top of the chart, and could not return itself from flatline. Support answer was "restart the server". ABSOLUTELY wrong answer. They never really recovered my good opinion from this flub.
2 - setup required the installation to be in one place, and one place only. We had to use NetOP to log into the one machine that had it running. We have several people here who want to know what's going on when the server gets tanked, so that was a problem. Support answer was a very long and drawn-out process of installing multiple instances of Idera to monitor one set of collected files on our primary system (which would have required multiple purchases).
3 - Idera's software does not use a SQL back-end, but instead a system of basically flat files. This raised the hair on the back of my neck - if the developers did not choose to use SQL themselves, how can they possibly expect me to believe they know enough to programmatically identify my "worst performing" query?
4 - Performance footprint against the observed server (a 2-CPU 3.0GHz system) was 15%-25% of the total CPU load after a period of about a week. This was not acceptable.
5 - Email notification couldn't deal with a cell phone text message address, because it was too long. Small detail, but small details are symptomatic of others, and it only takes one small one to screw something up.
In the end, while I can say Idera's initial solution was unsatisfactory, they were claiming that a follow-up version would fix items 2, 3, and 5. They didn't have a solution in mind for #1, though I can't imagine that their product manager would tolerate the continued existence of such an issue. #4, don't know if they can fix that, since their system is a very active observer.
We ended up testing Veritas' "i3" product line, and bought into its "Indepth" product, specifically. While Indepth and Idera's software are fairly different in their approach, Indepth had none of the problems above and quite a few different angles of attack, including a long-term analysis capability that I've been really happy with (it also maintains a client-server architecture with a browser-based interface). It's rather complicated, and the cost is a bit more than Idera, so I'd say it's worth a look before you sign any checks.
Hope this helps -
T
Thomas J. Theobald, MidwayUSA
Kindest Regards,Thomas J. Theobald
midwayusa.comUmpteen zillion products and counting for your favorite shooting sports...(and all run with SQL Server and Delphi)...come visit us at the website above!
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1 - not experience this myself. The answer was definately not good however.
2 - New version supports this from my understanding.
3 - New version logs to sql
4 - Not experienced this.
5 - I don't use email notification, so haven't tried that aspect.
When I started in my current position we had Indepth and it was running. I found it to be majorly intrusive, it would crash frequently and the cost of actually training on the tool to get anything from it ended up being more than the cost of implementation of DM across my entire production environment.
For me it was a no-brainer, however different environments and SQL usage patterns also require different specifics from a monitoring perspective, this was what worked for me.
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I also looked at this product. It was one of my favorites, but the reporting was very weak. I need more printable reports to calm the anxieties of everyone above me in the IT food chain.
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Question, in what way was the reporting weak? Do you mean to say that you can't print the reports or there are not enough of them. If this is the case then it will affect my decision to recommend this product.
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I've seen Veritas' product, it is very impressive but pricey. I bought Quest's Spotlight on SQL Server earlier this year and I'm very happy with it. I've heard good things about Idera but have not evaluated it myself.
Spotlight is more of a real-time monitoring product than long term trend analysis, but it presents a wealth of information in a very usable form.
One reason we bought it is because the salesman was desparate to book sales that quarter and was giving steep discounts. (I understand Idera salesmen will be VERY flexible between now and the end of the year for similar reasons).
The other reason we bought it is because of something that happened while I was evaluating it. I was taking a lot of flak about liking the product because of the pretty graphics. The main screen reminds some people of the sick bay monitor screens from the old Star Trek series. (That comment does not do justice to the product, but many people at my office actually think it's called Sick Bay Monitor. They really need to add the sound effects.) While I was running it, bad things were happening on one of the database servers at our web hosting site. The boss came over demanding immediate action and I connected Spotlight to that server. I immediately knew there was a severe locking problem (several million locks and climbing), and two mouse clicks later I knew which database and stored procedure was at fault (a DB for a new web site that had gone live that day). After he turned up the heat under the developers, he came back told me to give him a purchase order right away.
Of course, if I had been evaluating Idera, I might be a happy Idera customer now instead.
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You can't help but love a product that makes you look good.
And no, I am not associated with Quest in any way and am not being compensated for this post.
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I've tried Spotlight, and we purchased it at my previous company, but told them to take it back as it gave too many false positives, oh and we did have the Star Trek noises for errors....
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Not enough reports. It has great online screens and graphs. But to get the reports I needed - I would have to do screen shots and paste into Word. We have Crystal Reports, but I can't write my own reports until the new version that uses a backend database instead of the flat data files. I also l started looking into the free Microsoft SQL Server Health and History tool but hit a dead end because it doesn't monitor clustered SQL Servers. Is anybody else looking at SQLH&H Tool?
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Have you looked at SQLStripes from http://www.purenetworking.net I think that will do what you want
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