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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
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (12th)
SolarWinds Database Perform...
Ranking in Database Development and Management
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Database Development and Management category, the mindshare of IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server is 3.0%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is 3.2%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Database Development and Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer3.2%
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server3.0%
Other93.8%
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,…
SufiyanAminu - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Operation Center Engineer at Central Bank of Nigeria
Comprehensive monitoring has delivered accurate insights and supports reliable banking operations
In terms of technical support, there was a time we experienced issues, but that has been resolved. We encountered a downtime and attempted to contact technical support, which was quite challenging, but that has improved after we reported the issue and everything is now fine. Therefore, we do not have any issues with technical support currently. Regarding the AI functionality and observability, we tried to understand how the AI functionality works, and I believe there is a gap in our understanding. I do not know if a session can be organized for our team to gain more insight into the AI module or functionality. For now, the only two aspects that caused me some difficulties are support and AI. Aside from that, everything works flawlessly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"SQL monitoring time has been dramatically reduced and our IT Infrastructure team has improved SQL maintenance and monitoring knowledge over time just by using SQL DM."
"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."
"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."
"Ability to identify bottlenecks, deadlocks and slow running queries and run monthly and daily reports."
"Memory and CPU utilization features are good."
"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer helped us locate the performance issues quickly."
"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 layer, database layer, or elsewhere."
"The platform solves and prevents delays in receiving answers from databases."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support for older databases and the ability to manage them in a centralized dashboard."
"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer can help us identify issues we cannot see manually."
"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."
"The most valuable features I find in SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer are the granular level of details about database performance and other aspects such as queries—what queries are running and what queries are taking a long time."
"Real-time monitoring in SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is very useful for maintaining database performance, as many of our customers have been using multiple instances of this solution."
 

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."
"Some more granularity in alerting."
"They can improve checking the status of the CPU, memory, and IO utilization from each task."
"Tech support has been okay, not that great, but they made sure that we got what we were looking for."
"Scalability is what I mentioned earlier, regarding room for improvement. It doesn't seem to scale out to an environment as large as ours, with just a single monitoring server."
"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."
"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."
"With basic SQL training in my history, I've found at times I needed to Google SQL counters, for example, to understand what was occurring or how to configure SQL DM to be useful."
"I do not think that SolarWinds support is very good because it just takes too long to solve the problem."
"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer should include more details on how everything works."
"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer should be easy to implement and it should have more facilities to make it better."
"It is capable, but I don't believe it has the right value matrix. It also depends on the budget of the company."
"There is room for improvement with the pricing of the platform."
"For now, the only two aspects that caused me some difficulties are support and AI."
"One of things that I'd like to see is when you're dealing with a clustered instance or a rack instance, being able to visualize all the nodes for that one rack instance on a single page, so you can see if a particular node is maybe taking more load, if there's a problem with one of the nodes in your cluster, something like that."
"The areas where it currently lags are in reporting and dashboarding. The reports and dashboards are somewhat static, and we cannot create custom dashboards for specific customer needs."
 

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."
"Customers need to pay for the subscription-based license annually."
"It could be less expensive."
"The pricing is fairly reasonable, and it becomes more cost-effective with larger volumes of instances."
"The pricing of the solution is average."
"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."
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Top Industries

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

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 Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise11
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What needs improvement with SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer?
In terms of technical support, there was a time we experienced issues, but that has been resolved. We encountered a downtime and attempted to contact technical support, which was quite challenging,...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer?
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer's WPM and SAM modules are what I personally prefer. I am satisfied with the overall performance and how the dashboards are arranged. We are currently using ...
What advice do you have for others considering SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer?
For database performance, we have the module, but I would say we are not really consuming it because we are currently using PostgreSQL. We are exploring this module, but we have not yet started con...
 

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: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.