Using SQL Sentry Portal

Overview & Navigation

Default Home View

When you first log into SQL Sentry Portal, the home view displays the overall health of the monitored environment. 

SQL Sentry Portal Home view highlighting: 1. Navigation bar, 2. Sidebar, 3. Health Overview, and Alerts.

OptionDescription
1. Navigation barOptions for expanding the sidebar, selecting your alert timeframe, providing feedback, accessing documentation, and accessing user profile information. Full details are provided under the Navigation Bar section below.
2. SidebarThe sidebar has areas for overview options (Health Overview & Alerts) and the monitored Targets. Full details are provided under the Sidebar section below.
3. Health OverviewHealth Overview is the default view when opening SQL Sentry Portal.

  • Health Score shows a summary of overall health scores for the monitored environment.
  • Alerts by Severity breaks them into Critical, High, Medium, or Low (with a count for the number of alerts in each severity category).
  • Alerts by Tag breaks them into categories such as Network, CPU, Memory, Disk, or Other (with a count for the number of alerts in each tag).
4. AlertsA table of the most recent alerts that have been triggered across the monitored environment.

Navigation Bar

This is the default view for the navigation bar:

Navigation Bar outlining the Sidebar toggle, SQL Sentry logo, Product drop-down, Date Selector, Feedback, Documentation, and Profile.

OptionDescription
1. Sidebar toggleThe bars (or hamburger) button toggles the visibility of the left sidebar (the overview options and targets information)
2. SolarWinds SQL Sentry logoSelecting the SQL Sentry logo returns you to the home (Health Overview) view.
3. Time SlicerThe Time Slicer is available on the Health Overview at the Global (All Targets) and individual Target levels. The Time Slicer allows you to organize the alerting events displayed on the Health Overview by the time frame in which they occurred (within the last 24 hour interval).

Display events that occurred in the last 24 hours (the default setting) or narrow the displayed events to the last few hours, or minutes to identify more recent issues. The following time frames can be selected:
24 hours6 hours1 hour15 minutes
12 hours3 hours30 minutes
Note:  The Health Score will change depending on your selection due to the nature of the health score calculation.
4. DocumentationSelect the button to open expanded menu options:

5. PermissionsSelect the Permissions button to manage permissions in SQL Sentry Portal.

Sidebar

The sidebar has five main areas:

Portal Sidebar options outlining the Alerts, Target filtering, Targets, Unwatched Servers, and Version sections.
OptionDescription
1. Overview Options
  • Health displays information about events and their severity or tag for a variety of views, such as all server, targets, or groups.
  • Alerts displays a log of alerts that have been triggered in your environment as well as some configuration options for email.
2. Targets Filtering OptionsStart typing a target name in the filter to get to a filtered list of targets or a specific target. Use the Show Hierarchy switch to toggle the list of targets between an alphabetically ordered flat list and a list grouped by sites.Portal Target filtering view organized by Target hierarchy with Show Hierarchy enabled.
Note:  The target filtering option only appears when there are five or more targets.
3. TargetsTargets provides a list of all targets in your monitored environment.
4. Unwatched ServersUnwatched servers are targets that are not currently being monitored by SQL Sentry. See the Unwatched Servers section below for more details.
5. VersionThe current version of SQL Sentry Portal. See the Release Notes article for more details.

Unwatched Servers

Applies to the following products and features: The on-premises SQL Sentry Portal feature for SQL Sentry. See the Getting Started with SQL Sentry Portal article for more details.

In SQL Sentry Portal, the bottom of the sidebar contains a group for Unwatched Servers (similar to Inventory view). Unwatched servers are not currently being monitored by SQL Sentry. Use the SQL Sentry client to watch a target (you may need to purchase additional licenses).

Portal Unwatched Servers section with two servers VM-SSSRV9 and QW60S86-105A greyed out and unwatched.

Note:  A banner appears an individual unwatched targets across the SQL Sentry Portal views.

SQL Sentry Portal orange banner stating

Error Details

The Error Details chart displays a detailed log for the chart that failed to load properly. Select Error Details to display the log information. 

Feature Menu

When you select a target from the sidebar, the target Health view opens by default. From a target view like Health, the Navigation Bar toggles to a feature menu.

Portal Feature Menu with the Health tab currently selected.Feature Menu

The following options are available for individual targets:

  1. Health
  2. Performance
    • Performance Analysis is available in SQL Sentry Portal for VMware targets with Version 2022.3. 
  3. Storage
  4. Top SQL
  5. Blocking (SQL Sentry Portal only)
  6. Deadlocks (SQL Sentry Portal only)
  7. TempDB (SQL Sentry Portal only)

Distributed Databases

Applies to the following products and features: The on-premises SQL Sentry Portal feature for SQL Sentry. See the Getting Started with SQL Sentry Portal article for more details.

If you are using SQL Sentry Portal for SQL Sentry and have multiple SQL Sentry databases, you can configure your portal to display information for all your SQL Sentry databases through a single service. See the Distributed Databases article for more information.