When a critical application slows to a crawl, the finger-pointing begins. Is it the network, the storage, the code, or the database? For IT teams, finding the root cause can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. This immense pressure falls on SysAdmins, DBAs, development and operations (DevOps) engineers, and cloud architects tasked with keeping today’s complex hybrid and cloud environments running smoothly.
A common question we hear at SolarWinds is, "What’s the difference between SolarWinds®Server & Application Monitor (SAM) and Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) for monitoring SQL Server?" Although both are powerful tools, they are designed to answer fundamentally different questions. They are two sides of the same performance-monitoring coin.
The two sides of the same coin explained
A great way to understand the need for two distinct views is through a simple metaphor: think of monitoring your SQL Server like diagnosing a problem with a car.
- SAM is like the dashboard and onboard diagnostics—it tells you the engine temperature, oil pressure, and fuel level, and it answers the critical question, "Is the car’s infrastructure healthy and capable of performing?"
- DPA is the master mechanic who hooks up a diagnostic computer to listen to the engine—it analyzes the combustion timing and fuel injection patterns to understand why the car is sputtering or losing power, and it answers the crucial question, "Why is the engine performing poorly?"
In modern DevOps and platform engineering cultures, the traditional walls between teams are coming down. Developers are empowered to own the performance of their code, while SysAdmins and site reliability engineers need to see the full picture—from the application down to the infrastructure. Having both the dashboard view and the deep diagnostic capability is essential for shared visibility and rapid problem resolution.
Server & Application Monitor: Monitoring the entire application stack
SAM provides the essential outside-in view by connecting the dots between the health of your SQL Server and the entire application stack it relies on. The heart of its database monitoring is the powerful AppInsight for SQL template. This provides deep visibility into the instance, from performance counters and storage details to active user connections and expensive queries. It also delivers critical operational insights, monitoring the status of SQL Agent jobs and flagging recent backup failures.
This holistic, dependency-aware view is automatically visualized in the AppStack dashboard, mapping the complex relationships between your SQL Server instance, the host, the datastores, and the applications that depend on it. This allows SAM to answer critical questions such as:
- Is the server CPU or memory maxed out?
- Are we about to run out of disk space for our database files or logs?
- Is a storage latency issue on a shared datastore impacting the performance of my SQL Server?
But SAM has evolved far beyond infrastructure health. A key capability is the SQL Server User Experience Monitor. This isn’t simply another system check; it measures what your users feel. It works by executing a query against the database and timing the entire round trip—from connection to execution to the return of the result set. This directly measures end-user experience, allowing you to catch problems traditional metrics might miss.
Combined with the power of the SolarWinds Platform, you can drag and drop these user experience metrics into a PerfStack dashboard alongside network latency, storage input/output operations per second, and server CPU load to see the full correlated story in a single pane of glass.
Database Performance Analyzer: From root-cause analysis to intelligent advisor
DPA is widely regarded as the gold standard for understanding the why behind database slowness. It uses response time analysis to pinpoint the exact queries, waits, and sessions causing delays. But today, DPA is more than a diagnostic tool; it’s an intelligent performance advisor.
Several game-changing features power this evolution, including:
- AI Query Assist: Imagine being able to hand a poorly performing query to an expert DBA for analysis and recommendations—this is AI Query Assist; it uses generative AI to analyze slow SQL statements, provide plain-language explanations of the performance bottlenecks, and generate actionable suggestions for improvement, empowering junior DBAs and developers to write more efficient code from the start
- Tuning Advisors: DPA moves you from being reactive to proactive; its built-in advisors for queries, indexes, and tables constantly analyze your database workload and provide concrete, prioritized recommendations—telling you which indexes to create to have the biggest impact, how to rewrite a query for better performance, and how to identify table issues before they become major problems
- Anomaly Detection: Powered by machine learning, DPA learns your database’s unique performance patterns, automatically establishes dynamic baselines, and alerts you when something deviates from the norm; this is crucial for catching those intermittent slowdowns users complain about but that disappear by the time you start investigating
Beyond pure performance tuning, DPA also provides critical visibility into the reliability of your most important systems. For mission-critical environments, DPA offers deep monitoring for Always On Availability Groups, helping you identify synchronization bottlenecks and performance issues between replicas that could put your failover readiness at risk.
Monitoring where your data lives: On premises, hybrid, and cloud environments
Your data is no longer confined to the data center, and your monitoring shouldn’t be either. The SAM and DPA combination provides seamless visibility regardless of where your SQL Server instances are running.
- SQL Server on cloud infrastructure (infrastructure as a service): Whether you’re running SQL Server on an Azure VM or an Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud instance, to SAM and DPA, it’s only another node; you get the same comprehensive OS and infrastructure monitoring from SAM and the same deep query analysis from DPA you would get for an on-premises server
- Managed cloud databases (database as a service): This is where the combined power truly shines—for a managed service such as Azure SQL Database, you don’t have access to the underlying OS; SAM monitors its availability and response time via the Azure API while DPA connects directly to the Azure SQL Database instance to provide its full suite of response time analysis and query tuning advice; in the cloud, performance directly translates to cost, and by identifying and helping you fix inefficient queries that consume excess CPU and I/O, this combined solution improves speed and enables you to control and reduce your cloud spend, giving you complete performance visibility without ever needing to manage a server
Use cases for the modern era
Use Case | SAM | DPA |
An application is slow for users in our Azure environment. | Use the SQL User Experience Monitor to confirm the slow response time. Correlate this in PerfStack with Azure monitor metrics for the instance to rule out platform throttling. | Use Anomaly Detection to see if this wait time is abnormal. Drill into the specific timeframe to identify the exact queries from the applications that are slow and causing high wait times. |
We need to proactively optimize our most resource-intensive queries. | Use capacity planning features to trend resource utilization over time and identify the busiest periods for the database server. | Use the Tuning Advisors to get a prioritized list of the most impactful queries to fix and the index recommendations that will provide the biggest performance gains. |
A developer needs to understand why their query is slow without deep DBA knowledge. | Provide the developer with visibility into the server’s overall health during their tests to see if their code is causing CPU or memory spikes. | The developer can view their query in DPA and use AI Query Assist to get an easy-to-understand explanation of the performance problem and a suggested rewrite. |
We were alerted to an unusual performance spike overnight. | Review performance counters and logs from the time of the alert to see if a backup job, server process, or other scheduled task caused a resource conflict. | Drill down into the specific time of the spike in the historical view of DPA. Identify the exact SQL, program, and user that caused the spike and analyze the execution plan and wait events. |
Conclusion: Better together for complete visibility
In the complex IT world of 2025, you can’t afford to have blind spots. Monitoring infrastructure health without understanding query performance is only half the story. Likewise, analyzing queries without the context of the underlying application stack can lead you down the wrong path.
You get both sides of the coin by using SAM and DPA together on the SolarWinds Platform. Don’t settle for half the story. See how the SolarWinds Platform can give you the complete picture of your database performance—from the application stack to the individual query—no matter where your data lives.
