Best SQL Sentry Alternatives

Redgate Monitor

Redgate Monitor, formerly SQL Monitor, is the most direct alternative: a DBA-oriented monitor with real-time alerting, query performance analysis and an estate-wide overview. Redgate lists support for SQL Server 2008 R2 and later, and also PostgreSQL 10 and later, Oracle 19c and later, MySQL 8.0 and later and MongoDB 6.0 and later. It is sold in Standard and Enterprise editions, each self-hosted or SaaS; Redgate describes the SaaS edition as installing an agent and leaving maintenance and upgrades to Redgate.

Licensing is per server per year, with rules for Azure SQL Database (up to five databases per licence), cloud PaaS instances, cluster nodes and virtual machines, and volume tiers; prices are by quote. Against SQL Sentry, the main differences are the SaaS option and the wider engine coverage. See Redgate Monitor vs SQL Sentry.

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Idera SQL Diagnostic Manager

SQL Diagnostic Manager monitors SQL Server on premises, Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance, SQL Server on Amazon RDS and Google Cloud, and VMware and Hyper-V virtualisation. Idera lists waits, blocking chains, deadlocks, tempdb pressure, I/O latency, fragmentation, live sessions and replication health, and says it collects without installing agents on the monitored servers.

Idera prices it per instance with no per-GB ingest fees and stresses that you own the monitoring repository, which suits organisations that keep years of history for forensic analysis. Like SQL Sentry it is self-hosted and SQL Server-specific, so it is the closest like-for-like swap.

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Quest Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise

Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise is Quest's on-premises SQL Server monitor. Quest describes monitoring of the SQL Server relational engine, Analysis Services, Windows and Azure SQL from one console, with built-in metrics and alarms, custom collections, an integrated tuning module, and diagnosis of long-running processes, blocking and deadlocks. Quest's support portal lists 2026 updates for the product.

Quest retired its SaaS companion, Spotlight Cloud, on 31 December 2024 and has discontinued the Spotlight Cloud website and mobile features of Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise. Quest's hosted option for database monitoring is now Foglight Cloud, covered in the DPA alternatives guide.

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Datadog Database Monitoring

Datadog Database Monitoring (DBM) collects historical metrics for normalised queries, individual query samples, explain plans, host metrics and blocking information through the Datadog Agent. Datadog documents support for self-hosted and managed SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, MongoDB, Amazon DocumentDB and ClickHouse.

The reason to choose it over a dedicated SQL Server monitor is correlation: a slow endpoint in APM can be traced to the query and plan behind it. As listed on Datadog's pricing page on 7 October 2026, DBM costs USD 70 per database host per month billed annually (USD 84 month to month), on top of other Datadog products. See Datadog vs Redgate Monitor and database monitoring vs APM.

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SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

DPA is SolarWinds' other database product, built around wait-time (response time) analysis across many engines: Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Db2, SAP ASE and SAP HANA, plus Azure SQL, Amazon RDS and Aurora, and Google Cloud SQL. SolarWinds' documentation lists SQL Server 2022 and 2025 as the self-managed SQL Server versions supported by the current release, 2026.2 (30 June 2026).

It is an alternative within the same vendor: the DBSH licence can be split between SQL Sentry and DPA, so a team can move instances from one to the other without a new contract. It suits teams that need one tool for several engines more than SQL Sentry's SQL Server depth. See SQL Sentry vs SolarWinds DPA.

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Azure SQL database watcher

Database watcher is Microsoft's managed monitoring for Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance. It collects data from more than 70 catalog views and DMVs, including active sessions, wait statistics, top queries, index and table metadata, backup history and SQL Agent job history on Managed Instance, into Azure Data Explorer or Real-Time Analytics in Microsoft Fabric, with Azure portal dashboards and Azure Monitor alerts.

Microsoft states that watchers and dashboards are free and there is no charge per monitored resource or per user; you pay for the data store, network bandwidth and alerts. Limits are 100 SQL targets per watcher and 20 watchers per subscription.

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Query Store, Extended Events and the First Responder Kit

Every commercial monitor builds on data SQL Server already exposes. Query Store keeps query text, plans, runtime statistics and (from SQL Server 2017) per-query wait statistics inside each database; Extended Events captures deadlocks, blocking and long-running statements; DMVs such as sys.dm_os_wait_stats give instance-wide waits. This T-SQL query lists the queries with the highest total duration recorded in Query Store:

-- T-SQL (SQL Server 2016 and later, Azure SQL)
SELECT TOP (10)
       q.query_id,
       qt.query_sql_text,
       SUM(rs.count_executions) AS executions,
       SUM(rs.avg_duration * rs.count_executions) / 1000.0 AS total_duration_ms
FROM sys.query_store_query AS q
JOIN sys.query_store_query_text AS qt ON qt.query_text_id = q.query_text_id
JOIN sys.query_store_plan AS p ON p.query_id = q.query_id
JOIN sys.query_store_runtime_stats AS rs ON rs.plan_id = p.plan_id
GROUP BY q.query_id, qt.query_sql_text
ORDER BY total_duration_ms DESC;

The MIT-licensed SQL Server First Responder Kit adds procedures such as sp_Blitz (health check), sp_BlitzFirst (what is happening now), sp_BlitzCache (plan cache), sp_BlitzIndex and sp_BlitzLock (deadlocks). Its README says it supports SQL Server on Windows and Linux, Amazon RDS and Azure SQL Managed Instance, but not fully Azure SQL Database. For background, see the performance tuning lesson and error 1205 (deadlock victim).

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