Spotlight Reviews

I primarily use Spotlight for on-the-spot troubleshooting and alerting to see if there are any issues. The drill-down features allow me to pinpoint problems, whether they are indexing, long-running processes, or other performance issues.

Spotlight provides valuable features such as the ability to get alerted and drill down to a very granular level to find out where actual problems are coming from. The drill-down feature helps with isolation, root cause analysis, and determining next steps. 

It aids in preventing potential issues by allowing us to make correctable changes internally within SQL Server. When needed, it also helps address external influences affecting system design. 

Additionally, the historical data analysis is helpful for long-term capacity planning.

One improvement could be the inclusion of suggestions for missing indexes or better analysis of how indexes are utilized and how execution plans are used, similar to what other products offer.

Spotlight customer service is usually quite good. They are responsive and provide explanations when there is an issue or there is a need to clarify the product's interpretation of data.

Positive

DPA was one of the solutions I evaluated. It was comprehensive and offered solutions for issues, creating scripts for creating indexes, rewriting queries, etc. However, it was more complicated to set up as it branched off from the parent product for SolarWinds.

Spotlight was easy to set up. In contrast, DPA was a bit more complicated since it was associated with an overarching SolarWinds environment.

Spotlight is cost-effective compared to complete monitoring solutions, especially in smaller environments. It provides significant cost savings and allows for efficient IT operations across an enterprise domain.

The pricing for Spotlight was fairly reasonable, although bundling it with Foglight was a bit pricey.

The solutions I considered included DPA from SolarWinds, which was comprehensive and offered valuable insights, creating scripts for index creation, query rewriting, etc.

I would rate Spotlight probably an nine out of ten. My advice would be to consider its cost-effectiveness and ease of use in smaller environments.

We use the tool for the design and development of public APIs. It is used in the first cycle of our API development. The product helps us to create APIs in the format that we are looking for and use those specifications in our API documentation. 

We have experienced easiness in API designing. The product offers a good UI where a person who knows open API specifications can do drag-and-drop functions. The tool has accelerated our API development. It has also enabled automation for our customers. 

The tool is a SaaS product where I just need to type a URL and start with the design process. I can integrate all elements of source control like GitHub, GitLab, etc. The tool also supports authentication-related provisions like SSH. 

The software does not support webhooks. It doesn't support advanced versions of APIs. The tool also doesn't support advanced versions of specifications. The change that we do in one part of the model is not reflected throughout the specification. There are also some mutations in the clones. I am not able to do a local source control with the product as well. 

I have been working with the solution for three years. I use the tool's latest version. 

The tool is stable. 

The tool is scalable. My company has four to five users for the product. 

The tool offers good technical support. 

Positive

We did the tool's deployment in-house. We relied on one technical person to conduct the deployment process. 

The tool is cloud-based. It is priced well. 

I would rate the tool a nine out of ten. Anyone looking to use the tool needs to have a good background in API specifications and design. This product is purely for APU designing. 

We use it in our company, and it is used daily. It is primarily for standard monitoring of the databases and various aspects of performance tuning.

We are using its latest version.

Its dashboards are most valuable. The drill-down of the dashboards is useful.

Some customizations of the dashboard, such as having backup reports, would be useful.

In terms of additional features, I don't have anything specific in mind. I'm not using it in clustered environments, so I don't know how well it copes with those environments. I can't really judge.

We have been using this solution for about two years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. In terms of its users, there are two DBAs for monitoring the instances. 

I used them in the past. It was about 10 years ago, and it was very good back then. I haven't had to contact them. It is a stable product.

It was very straightforward. It took less than a day.

It was done in-house.

Its cost was somewhere in the middle. 

I would advise others to certainly evaluate other options. It is worthwhile evaluating other options every couple of years because the tech changes.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. It is fine, and it does the job.

We primarily use the solution for monitoring databases.

The time monitoring is a very useful feature. The solution is also very useful for analyzing if you have a problem. It's free to see via graphics varying times in order to analyze a problem.

The pricing is too expensive. They should work on a better pricing strategy.

The solution should improve its capacity to photograph situations and conserve it for the amount time I need, whether it's a day or a week, and to be able to look it up at a later date. The storage needs to be improved.

There's no reporting with this tool, and there really should be. They should add that into future releases.

The solution is stable.

I consider the solution very scalable.

We have never contacted technical support.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The alerting process, ease of setup and configuration are certainly valuable to us, as they keep us informed of the environment when things are running well – but the real strength of SpotLight w/PA is the ability to go back in time to find exactly what was causing an issue (or the pre-emptively highlight anomalies that may become issues in the future). The ability to fine-tune different alert levels, and to have it page the appropriate group for critical issues makes this product a vital part of our support structure.

The IT and Engineer divisions rely upon the product to analyze existing issues, and QA code changes. This application suite provides us with three different focus points: Customer Support uses it to maintain awareness of current systems-state. Information Technology uses it to understand and track system-level issues, as well as capacity planning, growth forecasting, and 24 hour text alerts of Critical issues. The Engineering team uses it to review impacts of code-changes, and for performance-tuning. Spotlight is the Jenkon single-point monitoring tool.

Jenkon is a Microsoft Partner, and we use Hyper-V as our virtualization base. This version of Spotlight provides additional information about “Virtualization Overhead”, but only for VMware (not Hyper-V).

Also, a wonderful “extra” of the Spotlight environment, was the ability to monitor, troubleshoot, and receive alarms directly to our mobile devices – via the Mobile Spotlight App. Unfortunately, the App broke when we upgraded from version 9 to version 10.

We have just participated in the live demonstration/training of the newest version of Spotlight (version 11.5). The good news is that both of these enhancements have been addressed in the latest version.

We started using the Spotlight/PA tools in August of 2013. The original version that we installed was 9.5.0.

The initial installation on our diagnostics server was very straightforward. Basic configuration was very simple, and even the more complex settings that can be set – were described in detail in the documentation.

The application was extremely stable and we had experienced no issues whatsoever, until we had to upgrade from version 9 to support Server 2012-R2. This issue was related to SQL 2008-R2, which required the urgent rebooting of the instance (Which was not a good thing to do with Production servers). We lost visibility of these servers from the new version of Spotlight until the reboot was performed

We had no issues scaling it for our needs.

The issue listed above has been the only time we’ve needed to have support help. They were unaware of the SQL 2008-R2 issue, and have verified that a similar issue does not exist in the new version. They have offered to be “on the line” when we perform this latest upgrade – to ensure our comfort level.

Previously, we were using Confio Ignite to monitor our systems. This product was very reliable, but considerably more complex to setup and configure. Alerting functions were limited, and there was no mobile app available.

The initial setup was straightforward, as this is a clientless install. The application is installed on a Diagnostics Server, with a SQL server back-end. We even use the same server to monitor multiple domains (untrusted). SQL DBAs can also configure specific monitoring/analytics that are more tailored to the details that they need.

The installation was performed by the IT department, and was simple. However, we recommend that a vendor team be involved with any upgrades to ensure compatibilities and assist with any unknown issues that arise.

The Return on Investment for Spotlight is against soft-costs, generally speaking. It has drastically cut down on issue response-time, resolution-time, and development costs (in terms of shorter development/QA times). Work with your vendor to discuss your long-term goals for this product, and set up a test/demo environment first to see the value-add for your environment.

The new version has all of the enhancements that we were hoping for. We highly recommend this to any company that relies upon their SQL DB environments for critical data, and cannot afford downtime (or wish to mitigate issues, and shorten resolution times).