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BMC TrueSight vs IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

BMC TrueSight
Ranking in Event Monitoring
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (30th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (25th), Cloud Monitoring Software (26th), AIOps (15th)
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manage...
Ranking in Event Monitoring
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Event Monitoring category, the mindshare of BMC TrueSight is 8.2%, down from 8.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server is 4.9%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BMC TrueSight8.2%
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server4.9%
Other86.9%
Event Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Has improved monitoring efficiency and supports fast issue resolution through responsive support and reliable automation
I work with BMC TrueSight and have been using it for eight-plus years BMC TrueSight brought a positive impact and benefits to our organization. The customization part is one of the advantages of the product, along with the monitoring capabilities. Automated root cause analysis and predictive…
reviewer2317098 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Offers effective monitoring of resources but lacks the ability to connect to an AWS instance and write custom queries.
We use it mainly for monitoring, including CPU, memory, and disk space, and for troubleshooting purposes We've set up alerts to notify us when performance deviates from the baseline we've configured for each resource. So, whenever that happens, we get an alert and can investigate immediately. So,…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Signature baselines, which have allowed us to fine tune many of our events and significantly reduce the number of events generated."
"Helix Innovation Studio is a very good feature. It allows us to develop our own enterprise applications and make them available for the customers."
"BMC TrueSight Operations Management can be used to monitor anything on-premises, including the server, applications, log monitoring, event IT monitoring, and process monitoring."
"Its event management capabilities are very open and flexible. I haven't seen a use case scenario with a customer that we couldn't actually solve the problem for, so it's really good. There are some interesting things that happen in an enterprise network (things that people don't normally expect), and the event management product is very flexible. You can solve problems as far as your imagination can go with it."
"I like everything about this tool. I recommend this solution to anyone looking for a standalone solution with high availability meaning that can be used depending on the customers requirements."
"The fact that they have a very integrated relationship with Sentry Software, the Knowledge Module, is valuable... The richest feature for us is the number of Knowledge Modules that we can load into the product to add breadth of service to the customer. It enables us to move up the operational stack from hardware, to operating system, to application, and to cloud... That enables us to provide one pane of glass over all those layers - hardware, OS, app, and cloud."
"Having a good monitoring implementation has made a world of difference to our operations teams."
"BMC TrueSight Operations Management is easily scalable."
"Ability to identify bottlenecks, deadlocks and slow running queries and run monthly and daily reports."
"Monitors and alerts on our mission critical instances in real-time on a 24/7 basis."
"Memory and CPU utilization features are good."
"SQL DM made troubleshooting much easier and allowed multiple people to look into an issue with confidence."
"The most valuable features are disk space projections for planning, and also the Snapshotting ability, to look back in time, to see what was going on the server at a particular time. It's basically the output of an sp_who2."
"One of the things that it is used for is to detect anything that could possibly cause our systems not to function well, and it has helped us to determine that before anything has actually happened."
"There are several monitoring tools, but IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager is actually better than other competitors."
"Overall, it has allowed us to do more with database management and run more databases on a given server, because we're able to isolate issues quicker and take the proactive steps necessary to correct them."
 

Cons

"We're end-of-lifeing it now. Overall, the licensing costs of BMC are a challenge for us in that they're hard costs, whereas open-source monitoring has soft costs, where it's harder to line-item."
"The UI for the end users could be improved and more flexible than it is now."
"Pricing is very high."
"In our company, we faced some issues with the solution’s application endpoint, IP, and the physical location of the transactions."
"The dashboards could be better. The graphs are extremely limited."
"Cost is an issue with BMC TrueSight Operations Management."
"I think the solution is overly complex and requires a lot of resources."
"The solution's support service could be better."
"They can improve checking the status of the CPU, memory, and IO utilization from each task."
"I'm going to do an upgrade which may resolve my issues, but one area for improvement is its ability to handle the amount of data that we collect with it. We're likely one of the largest installations, with over 300 servers being collected with this product, and sometimes there are gaps. That would really be my only concern, in terms of how the data is collected and stored, for consistency."
"We don't find that it helps us with performance monitoring and diagnostics. We find that SentryOne does that better. Also, in terms of alerts, we had to customize them dramatically so that we didn't get alerted on every little thing."
"One thing I'd like to see is the ability to view the execution plan and have the system automatically recommend potential query optimizations, especially at the query level."
"The initial setup gives too many user rights to the server, so you have to put a user that is part administrator's group - that's the preferred way - on each server, which is kind of a risk. You want to do least privilege and you're not doing that."
"Reporting and overall analysis of data gathered from SQL Server."
"I would absolutely love to create customized dashboards but, unfortunately, they don't provide me the information that I need to create the report. The report I need is the detail or the transaction detail that's happening on those Snapshots. I'd like to be able to go back through time and search for things. I don't have that functionality, which is very disappointing. That's pretty bad and frustrating because I could query it and find out so much information about what's hitting my environment and when, but instead, they want control over it and to not give me that information. So it's encrypted. I can't pull it out and that is really bothersome."
"It would helpful if SQL DM could mark when changes are made within the program."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is all volume-driven. I think we were paying between $80 and $85 per license. That's per unit, for a perpetual license. You pay it one time and then, every year, you pay 20 percent of that for annual maintenance and support. But now that we've grown, we've purchased tens of thousands of licenses and the cost per license has gone down to something like less than $30..."
"The cost depends on the usage."
"Consider scalability very carefully: how much you want to monitor and what components are very important. Then, depending on these two things, filter out unwanted metrics or attributes. If you do a good job at filtering the data, then your licensing costs will be manageable."
"We did a five-year, multimillion dollar deal."
"Pricing is very high."
"We pay license fees of between $150 and $200 per asset. There is an enterprise software license fee, and then you pay a percentage for your maintenance, and then Premier Support. For example, if you buy a two-year license for the product, then the maintenance fee is added to that for two years at X percent a year. Then there's a small fee on top of that for Premier Support..."
"Annual licensing amount depends on the customers requirements. Support is an additional fee and there are options for three and five year support."
"Use conservative figures. In terms of hardware, monitored servers and also effort. The product is not cheap. But as with other products, you get what you pay for."
"We were upgraded to Premium Support without their actually asking us, when we were quoted. Then I asked for Standard Support and that they had to re-quote us that. But they don't do that by default. They upcharge you by default, which I didn't think was very nice, without even asking."
"The pricing is reasonable, it's comparable with the competitors."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Construction Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with BMC TrueSight Operations Management?
There are some complexities with deployment that could be improved in BMC TrueSight.
What is your primary use case for BMC TrueSight Operations Management?
I work with BMC TrueSight and have been using it for eight-plus years.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

ProactiveNet, TrueSight Operations Management
IDERA SQL DM, IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ensono, Transamerica, Boston Scientific, Park Place Technologies, inContact, TD Ameritrade, PNC Bank
Padnos, University of Notre Dame, D4, Infeon Technologies, Chevron, LC Waikiki, Sisters of Saint Francis Health Services, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, CVE, Colorado State University, St. Charles, Chaucer PLC, 1-800-Flowers, Ancoris, Money Management, National Opinion Research Center, California Department of Health, Plexus; Aviva, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, CBS, Comcast, Google, Merck, Regions Financial, Schneider Electric, Tata Consultancy Services, Verizon Communications, Zurich Financial Services
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC TrueSight vs. IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.