The most important and best feature of sql monitor is the detailed description of the job which we scheduled. If you are frequent user of sql monitor so you don’t need to use any other monitoring tool.

The only alarming thing is it takes many resources.

Get a good overview on what's going on on your SQL Server estate and narrow down potential problems up to the milisecond. Teamleads are getting more and more excited once they run into trouble and are able to pinpoint a most certain bad process!

Gives you deep insight on the database and (SQL Server) instance level to check out the health of your entire SQL Server Estate in near real time. Quickly drilldown to reported potential problems, such as long running queries, analyse actual queryplans and get recommendations from that as well. Many possibilities to configure alerts and notifications way down to individual processes, jobs or at a higher level like database or server instance ... They have a superb support crew and are introducing new features and functionality at high speed, realy listening very closely to users for feature requests ...

Takes a while to get a good understanding of what you're looking at, but once you watch the onlne videos or documentation it's a great asset in monitoring the SQL Server estate.

Nicely presented stats and metrics, easy to use tool

Not very many benefits really if you know what you're looking for already and have existing more central monitoring tools.

It does the work I would need to do myself.

I was on the beta test team and have seen the product grow from a very basic monitoring tool into one that puts nearly anything I would want to look at, right at my fingertips. Not only am I warned when conditions are getting ugly, I can very quickly figure out why! But the most importantly thing about the product, is the development cycle. They are constantly fixing and improving it with updates/patches nearly every 2 weeks.

I want to preface this with nearly all updates go without a hitch, but ... With such an aggressive release schedule, testing is obviously limited. This only happened once in the 10 years of the product, but I was one of the casualties. There was an update that left a transaction open in a version of SQL Server, that was a few releases back. You do this with software that does a lot for a long time, and things start to break.

SQL Monitor has been very useful in detecting server issues before they become a huge problem. I've been able to track down and correct issues that wouldn't have been noticed otherwise using this product.

I love the customization of alerts and the email feature that goes with them as well the ability to see all servers' health at a glance on the Overview page. Creating custom reports is also a handy feature.

The initial setup and the adding of servers was not easy and required some hit and miss before getting it right. The default settings for alerts are set a bit too high for our system and I had to lessen them to avoid mass email alerts. Also, and it may already exist, it would be nice to choose to ignore offline databases.