Redgate Monitor vs SolarWinds DPA

Quick verdict

Redgate Monitor (formerly SQL Monitor) is Redgate's database monitoring and alerting tool, now at version 14 (14.34.0 released on 30 September 2026). Its documentation lists monitoring for SQL Server 2008 R2 to 2025, PostgreSQL 10 to 18, MySQL 8.0.31 and later, Oracle 19c and later (on Linux or Amazon RDS) and MongoDB 6.0 to 8.0. It is sold in Standard and Enterprise editions, each self-hosted or SaaS.

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) is SolarWinds' wait-based database performance tool; the current release in the documentation is 2026.2. SolarWinds describes it as agentless: the DPA server connects over JDBC and runs a "quickpoll" query, once per second by default, to record what each session is waiting on. It supports a long list of engines and cloud services. SolarWinds became privately held in April 2025 after its acquisition by Turn/River Capital, and also sells SQL Sentry for deeper SQL Server monitoring.

Side by side

Key differences

Philosophy: estate health or wait-time analysis

Redgate Monitor is designed to watch many servers and tell you when something is wrong: a global overview of the estate, host metrics (CPU, memory, disk), SQL Server Agent job and backup history, storage and growth, availability group health, and an alert inbox. Its alert list includes blocking process, deadlock, long-running query, unusual job duration, database unavailable and availability group replication falling behind. Query-level diagnosis (top queries, waits, plans) sits beneath that.

DPA starts from response time. Because it samples every session once per second, its charts show how much time each query spent waiting and on which wait types, so you can see which statements account for most of the time in a given hour or day and how that changed. SolarWinds adds machine-learning anomaly detection, table tuning advisors, and AI Query Assist (extended to PostgreSQL and MySQL in 2026.2). It reports less on the surrounding server estate than Redgate Monitor does.

You can see the raw material of the wait-time approach with one DMV query. This T-SQL shows what each active request is waiting on right now and which session, if any, is blocking it; a sampler like DPA records this kind of snapshot every second and keeps the history:

-- T-SQL (SQL Server, Azure SQL)
SELECT r.session_id,
       r.blocking_session_id,
       r.status,
       r.wait_type,
       r.wait_time AS wait_time_ms,
       t.text AS sql_text
FROM sys.dm_exec_requests AS r
CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_sql_text(r.sql_handle) AS t
WHERE r.session_id <> @@SPID;

For more on reading waits and blocking, see our performance tuning lesson and the error 1205 deadlock page.

Engine coverage

DPA supports more engines. Its supported-versions page lists Oracle 19c to 26ai, SQL Server 2022 and 2025, SAP ASE 16, IBM Db2 11.5 and 12.1, MySQL 8.4 and 9.x, Percona MySQL 8.0, MariaDB 11.4 to 12.1, PostgreSQL 14 to 18, EDB Postgres 14 to 16 and SAP HANA, plus managed services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. SolarWinds notes that it stops supporting a database version once the database vendor does.

Redgate Monitor covers five engines but a wider range of SQL Server versions, back to 2008 R2. If you still run SQL Server 2016 or 2019 outside RDS, check DPA's list carefully: the current page lists only 2022 and 2025 for self-managed SQL Server. If you run Db2, SAP ASE or SAP HANA, Redgate Monitor does not cover them.

SQL Server specifics

• Waits. Both collect them. Redgate Monitor stores server waits (kept for one week by default) alongside top queries. Wait time per query is DPA's central metric.
• Blocking and deadlocks. Redgate Monitor alerts on blocking processes and captures deadlock graphs from an Extended Events session. DPA shows blocking sessions and, for SQL Server, deadlock details including victims, survivors, locked resources and the victim impact.
• Query Store. Redgate Monitor's query history graph takes data from Query Store and marks plan changes. We did not find Query Store integration documented for DPA, which relies on its own sampling.
• Availability groups. Redgate Monitor alerts on AG query slowdown and replication lag, but does not support AGs on Linux or clusterless Basic AGs. DPA shows AG status and annotations and alerts on AG failover and status change; AG monitoring features are not enabled for distributed AGs.

Architecture and hosting

Redgate Monitor uses Base Monitor services that connect to monitored machines and write to a repository on SQL Server or PostgreSQL 16+ with TimescaleDB. Redgate documents running components on Windows, Linux and Docker, and sells a SaaS edition if you prefer not to host the web tier and repository.

DPA is a single server application with a repository database, which can be SQL Server 2022 or 2025, Oracle 19 to 26ai, MySQL 8.4 or 9.2, or Azure SQL Database. The DPA server runs on Windows Server 2022 or 2025 or on Linux (x86-64, not ARM). SolarWinds says DPA causes less than 1% overhead on the monitored instance and installs no software on it; that is the vendor's figure. It recommends keeping the DPA server, repository and monitored instances on the same fast network, or in the same cloud region. DPA Central links several DPA servers into one view. SolarWinds' SaaS database monitoring is a separate product, SolarWinds Observability SaaS; see Datadog vs SolarWinds DPA for the SaaS comparison.

Alerting

Redgate Monitor sends notifications by email, Slack, webhook, SNMP and PagerDuty, and has native ServiceNow and Microsoft Teams integrations since release 14.1. Alerts can be suppressed in maintenance windows and tuned per server.

DPA alert categories are wait time, resources, administrative and custom alerts, with customisable email templates and SNMP traps. Platform Connect links DPA to ServiceNow and PagerDuty.

Pricing and licensing

Redgate Monitor. Paid, annual subscription per server, in Standard or Enterprise editions, each self-hosted or SaaS. One licence covers one server with any number of instances, one VM, one cluster node, one cloud PaaS instance, or five Azure SQL databases. The pricing page shows volume bands (1 to 4, 5 to 9 and 10 to 19 servers; contact sales for 20 or more), but the figures load dynamically and we could not read them reliably. A 14-day free trial is available, and Redgate also sells through the AWS and Azure marketplaces.

SolarWinds DPA. Paid. Since DPA 2024.4 the licence types are Database Self-Hosted (DBSH), which can monitor any supported database type, and Database Self-Hosted DBaaS (DBSHDS), for database services such as Azure SQL Database. Both are subscription only and are allocated per monitored database instance; DBSH licences can also be used with SQL Sentry. Perpetual licences (with annual maintenance) were sold for earlier DPA versions, and older Category 1 and Category 2 licences still appear in the documentation as legacy types. SolarWinds does not publish prices; you request a quote. A 14-day trial is available.

Pricing checked on the vendors' official pages on 7 October 2026. Prices change; confirm before buying.

Where each one leads

Limitations

When to choose each

When neither is right

• You want database metrics inside an application observability platform: compare Datadog vs Redgate Monitor and Datadog vs SolarWinds DPA, and read database monitoring vs APM.
• Your estate is all SQL Server and you want deeper Microsoft-platform detail (SSAS, Agent job calendar, hypervisor hosts): see Redgate Monitor vs SQL Sentry.
• You only need occasional diagnosis on a few instances: Query Store, Extended Events and the DMVs in SSMS are free. See the best database monitoring tools.

Final recommendation

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Redgate Monitor product page
• Redgate Monitor pricing
• Redgate Monitor 14 documentation: monitored SQL Servers
• Redgate Monitor 14 documentation: how Redgate Monitor connects to monitored servers
• Redgate Monitor 14 documentation: data retention policy
• Redgate Monitor 14 documentation: performance-related alert types
• Redgate Monitor 14.1+ release notes
• SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer product page
• DPA: database instances DPA can monitor
• DPA architecture
• DPA 2026.2 system requirements
• DPA license types
• DPA: identify blocking sessions and deadlocks
• DPA: monitoring SQL Server Availability Groups
• DPA: about reports (data summarisation)
• Microsoft Learn: sys.dm_exec_requests

Checked October 2026.

How we research comparisons: our editorial method.