I used Quest Spotlight in my previous company. I switched companies, so my current company has been using this solution since I joined. 

When we looked at it we thought the features were good, so we started using it. We do have another similar product that we also use, it's called Cycle Monitor.

No. We were floundering around with MS SQL counters, event logs, SQL trace and profiler and were basically in the dark.

We previously used a home-brewed alerting package that was very dated.

We recently switched to SolarWinds DPA 9.0 because it provides similar functions but with better pricing model.