Evaluation of VividCortex

The sales guys at VividCortex have been hounding me to do a trial with them so I got approval from my manager to setup their agents on our database servers. Overall,  really like the monitoring provided and the support from the VividCortex has been excellent. Even Baron the CEO got on the phone to speak with us. Sadly, my company has little interest in monitoring the database servers this closely. The profiler provided by VividCortex has been the best I've seen. There have been a few annoying things with the website which I wish could change but the support people said that they were not interested. For example, we have a database server with far too many schemas on it. Over 1000 database schemas for a SAAS app. The VividCortex dashboard would only allow me to see the top 50 busiest schemas. I know it is unusual to have such a large number of schema on a database server so that makes sense but I still wish I could have seen more on their dashboard.

While reviewing queries in the profiler, I wanted to be able to hide or snooze queries I had already looked at it. If I am going to look at this everyday and try to find improvements, I don't want to see the exact same queries everyday that I know development will never fix and just want to skip onto the other ones.

I liked how the agent could catch warnings that normally would be lost of only caught on the application side. It looked like every single query was being caught each second. When I've used other profiler like JetProfiler, it isn't able to catch everything.

There wasn't much interest in development in reviewing their queries on production. I kind of thought the developers would be more excited to see how their app is performing in production. Perhaps they are too busy and don't entirely feel any responsibility for the operations side at this point.

The price point was also too difficult for my company to accept. They seem to be satisfied with a piece of junk software like Ganglia which averages out out database performance metrics every hour and doesn't even provide query analytics because it is free.