I'm going to do an upgrade which may resolve my issues, but one area for improvement is its ability to handle the amount of data that we collect with it. We're likely one of the largest installations, with over 300 servers being collected with this product, and sometimes there are gaps. That would really be my only concern, in terms of how the data is collected and stored, for consistency.

One thing I'd like to see is the ability to view the execution plan and have the system automatically recommend potential query optimizations, especially at the query level.

In future releases, I would like to see the ability to connect to an AWS instance and write custom queries.

I wish there were more tools or more you could add. There are some there, out-of-the-box, but if there were many more, with more options, that would be better.

We don't find that it helps us with performance monitoring and diagnostics. We find that SentryOne does that better.

In terms of alerts, we had to customize them dramatically so that we didn't get alerted on every little thing.

I would absolutely love to create customized dashboards but, unfortunately, they don't provide me the information that I need to create the report. The report I need is the transaction detail that's happening on those Snapshots. I'd like to be able to go back through time and search for things. I don't have that functionality, which is very disappointing. That's pretty bad and frustrating because I could query it and find out so much information about what's hitting my environment and when, but instead, they want control over it and to not give me that information. So it's encrypted. I can't pull it out and that is really bothersome.

For example, a use case is where a user is using a particular account from a particular desktop, to be able to connect to our database, and we want to track all the times that they did that. I have no facility to do that, even though the tool contains that information and stores that information. Instead, I have to go through the History Browser and click every five minutes and go back every five minutes and look and query and then go back and it's too cumbersome, considering it's a database tool. I should be able to query it like a database.

With basic SQL training in my history, I've found at times I needed to Google SQL counters, for example, to understand what was occurring or how to configure SQL DM to be useful. While support has helped out, it's not their job to teach SQL! The built in help works for general configuration of the product but sometimes lacks the descriptions needed for fully understanding the intent of particular settings.

It would helpful if SQL DM could mark when changes are made within the program. This would make it easier to see on a graph when something happened and the effect of that change.

Some more granularity in alerting.

We created several stored procedures/functions that would query multiple DMV’s and alert if a certain threshold was reached. However, since new DMV’s are added, or older ones are adjusted, it caused too much headache to continue to support the home brew method.

Reporting and overall analysis of data gathered from SQL Server.

They can improve checking the status of the CPU, memory, and IO utilization from each task.