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Product: sqlSentry v2.7.
Publisher: InterCerve, Inc.
Pricing
* sqlSentry Annual Maintenance is required during the first year. The term begins when the software license is issued; and includes software updates, new versions and tech support.
** The Quick Start Packs include both SQL Server Instance and Task Scheduler Licenses. Each pack includes the first year software maintenance in the package price. Subsequent years will be billed at $199 per SQL Server instance and $59 per Windows Task Scheduler on an annual renewal basis.
Key Features:
The complexity of a DBA's job increases with the number of SQL Servers he or she has to manage, and the more jobs each SQL Server has. The more servers and jobs there are, the more time it takes to create and schedule jobs, the more time it takes to monitor if scheduled jobs complete successfully, and the more work it takes to ensure that jobs don't conflict with each other and inadvertently affect performance.
While SQL Server includes the ability to create, manage, monitor, and track the performance of jobs, the available tools are cumbersome if there are lots of SQL Servers and jobs to manage. In fact, this can become the bane of the DBA, as he or she manages, monitors, and troubleshoots hundreds of jobs on multiple servers. Some DBAs spend a good portion of their jobs just maintaining SQL Server jobs. Then the lack of easily managed, reliable notifications with a robust selection of conditions and actions only compounds the issue.
One such company that ran into this very problem was InterCerve, Inc., a Microsoft-centric Web hosting company based in North Carolina. As part of their Web hosting services, they manage SQL Servers for their clients. And like many organizations, as the number of SQL Servers they managed increased, so did their headaches, along with the administrative costs. They looked for a third-party tool to help them alleviate this problem, but they found none existed. But unlike many companies, they decided to write their own, and once they found out how helpful it was, they decided to market it themselves. This product is sqlSentry.
sqlSentry is an enterprise-level SQL Server job automation/scheduling and monitoring tool that makes it easy to manage and monitor SQL Server jobs and Windows Task Scheduler events, from a single console. With proper implementation, sqlSentry can help reduce administration, hardware, and software costs, reduce down time, and improve SQL Server performance.
In this review, we take an in-depth look at how well sqlSentry meets its stated goals.
In this review, here is what we are going to look at:
All of these questions will be answered in this extensive review.
The major benefits of sqlSentry can be summed up this way (taken from the publisher's web site and product documentation):
So, does sqlSentry fully meet these described benefits? After carefully reviewing and testing the software (as you will see as you read the review), sqlSentry indeed does so.
In this section, we look at the key features the software publisher claims that sqlSentry does. Throughout this review, we verify each one to see if the feature does exist, and if it performs as expected.
Before we look at each of the above features, one by one, let's learn a little more about how sqlSentry works. This will give us the perspective we need to better understand how all of these features fit together.
