Documentation forSQL Sentry

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. 

Option Description
1. Navigation bar Options 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. Sidebar The sidebar has areas for overview options Alerts Log & Dashboards) and the monitored Targets. Full details are provided under the Sidebar section below.
3. Health Overview Health Overview is the default view when opening SQL Sentry Portal.

  • Overall Health Score shows a summary of your overall health score for the monitored environment in 24 hour periods.
  • Environment Score card lets you filter by health score status to quickly identify critical and unhealthy monitored targets.

See Health for more information.
4. Alerts Log A table of the most recent alerts that have been triggered across the monitored environment.

See Alerts Log for more information. 

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.

Option Description
1. Sidebar toggle The bars (or hamburger) button toggles the visibility of the left sidebar (the overview options and targets information)
2. SolarWinds logo Selecting the SQL Sentry logo returns you to the home (Health Overview) view.
3. Documentation Select the ? button to open expanded menu options:

  • Select Documentation to open the SQL Sentry Portal documentation.
  • Select SolarWinds support to go to support.solarwinds.com
  • Select Submit a feature request to submit ideas about any issues, features you'd like to see, or suggested changes.
4. Permissions Select the Permissions button to manage permissions in SQL Sentry Portal.

Sidebar

The sidebar has four main areas:

Option Description
1. Overview Options
  • Alerts displays a log of alerts that have been triggered in your environment as well as some configuration options for email.
  • Dashboards displays the Dashboard Digest with any created custom charts.
2. Targets Filtering Options Start 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 ordered flat list by target type 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. Targets Targets provides a list of all targets in your monitored environment.
4. Version The current version of SQL Sentry Portal.

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.

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
  6. Deadlocks
  7. TempDB

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.