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IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

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

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manage...
Ranking in Database Development and Management
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (15th)
SolarWinds Database Perform...
Ranking in Database Development and Management
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Database Development and Management category, the mindshare of IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server is 3.5%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is 4.1%, down from 9.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Database Development and Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer4.1%
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server3.5%
Other92.4%
Database Development and Management
 

Featured Reviews

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,…
reviewer2787105 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager - Production Database Administration at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Deep query analysis has reduced MTTA and MTTR and now safeguards critical customer workloads
In addition to the features SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer offers, I wish it had more robust performance monitoring and analyzing features for PostgreSQL databases. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is very strong when we come to SQL Server, but it is still lagging when it comes to PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is an upcoming enterprise-level database technology in the market. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is still struggling to have a solid monitoring and performance analyzer in comparison to SQL Server. This is one of the features I am looking to SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer to develop as soon as possible. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer can be improved in two areas. One is more and robust performance monitoring and analyzing features for PostgreSQL databases. Second, SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is still lagging for monitoring the cloud instances of databases including Aurora DB and Cloud SQL DB. These two areas are where SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer needs to work extensively to make this monitoring and performance analyzing robust. From an operational perspective, SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer still has a limitation of 250 licenses per instance. This is really a problem for someone with larger server sizes available and more instances running on the same SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer URL. SolarWinds should look at how they can increase that threshold because there should not be a limit of 250 instances.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Monitors and alerts on our mission critical instances in real-time on a 24/7 basis."
"The best part of SQL DM is the ability to customize alerts and counters. This allows our team to find an issue then alert on the issue at a granular level."
"Memory and CPU utilization features are good."
"We're able to diagnose issues prior to their actually becoming issues. Without the alerting, we wouldn't have a clue as to what was going to happen. With the alerting, it gives us a heads-up that a specific threshold has been met, and we need to take specific action."
"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."
"SQL DM made troubleshooting much easier and allowed multiple people to look into an issue with confidence."
"The ability to go back and look at historical data is the most valuable feature."
"Using SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer has positively impacted our organization by decreasing the time taken for our database deployments by 37%, reducing the baseline learning period from one to two weeks to a shorter period of time, saving resources, and providing real-time dashboards and automated alerts that have allowed us to save at least 28 to 32% in costs, optimizing better and following the advisor recommendations to prevent outages by improving that part by 22 to 28%."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is anomaly detection. It alerts you when things outside the norm are happening, and the feature that analyzes your indexes informs you if you have wide or overlapping indexes. It also helps identify SQL query bottlenecks, letting you know if something is taking longer than usual, if a query plan has changed, and if you need to update statistics. In terms of usage, it is straightforward to use, learn and understand. The patching process is smooth and explains each feature, including links to external resources for further reading."
"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer has positively impacted my organization by monitoring my critical systems serving millions of customers with a couple of hundred licenses of SQL SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer."
"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer can help us identify issues we cannot see manually."
"Monitoring is most valuable, and being able to know that there is an issue or problem and I need to go look is also valuable. So, monitoring and learning are the most important features."
"What I like most about SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is that it's a powerful solution that lets me advise customers about performance, and it also gives a lot of supporting information."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"The platform solves and prevents delays in receiving answers from databases."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"It would helpful if SQL DM could mark when changes are made within the program."
"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."
"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."
"They can improve checking the status of the CPU, memory, and IO utilization from each task."
"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."
"I feel that SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is a really good solution without needing significant changes, but I would suggest improvements in the feature friction to make it easier for small organizations, as it is currently limited in automation and manual tuning advice is needed."
"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer should be easy to implement and it should have more facilities to make it better."
"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is still lagging for monitoring the cloud instances of databases including Aurora DB and Cloud SQL DB."
"One area where the tool could improve is by adding support for additional databases. For instance, supporting newer databases like Couchbase or MongoDB would be beneficial."
"There is room for improvement with the pricing of the platform."
"It is capable, but I don't believe it has the right value matrix. It also depends on the budget of the company."
"The solution should add little details on the server so that an independent team could easily do the implementation."
"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer should include more details on how everything works."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is reasonable, it's comparable with the competitors."
"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."
"It could be less expensive."
"Customers need to pay for the subscription-based license annually."
"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is a little bit expensive."
"There are no extra costs for maintenance or using the solution's support."
"I don't remember the exact licensing cost for SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer, but it's within the range of $2,000 to $3,000 a year."
"The pricing of the solution is average."
"The pricing is fairly reasonable, and it becomes more cost-effective with larger volumes of instances."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Healthcare Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What do you like most about SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer?
In IT, problems often occur in areas such as applications, web interfaces, or databases. The tool allows users to easily determine the root cause of these issues, whether they stem from the network...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer?
In addition to the features SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer offers, I wish it had more robust performance monitoring and analyzing features for PostgreSQL databases. SolarWinds Database Pe...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer?
My main use case for SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is as a database performance monitoring tool. My day-to-day purpose of utilizing SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is for monito...
 

Also Known As

IDERA SQL DM, IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager
Confio, SolarWinds DPA, Ignite8
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
GSI Commerce, Liquid Digital Media, ProLogis, Indiana University
Find out what your peers are saying about IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.