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BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps vs IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 7, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

BMC Helix Operations Manage...
Ranking in Event Monitoring
2nd
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
AIOps (6th)
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manage...
Ranking in Event Monitoring
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Event Monitoring category, the mindshare of BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps is 8.3%, down from 13.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server is 2.9%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Event Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps8.3%
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server2.9%
Other88.8%
Event Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

SN
Solutions architect at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Have improved operational agility and reduced issue resolution time through automation and proactive insight
I have worked in an R&D environment where we have continuous research and continuous development focus on how to improve specific aspects of a specific offering, whether it is a product or a service or a combination of product and service with BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps. I have seen over time, over the past maybe decade or maybe a couple of decades, different areas of improvements. There is always room for improvements. As of now, I think having that level of automation, the integrative nature where the solution parameters bring residency across protecting data, across bringing better functionality across the operational environments, really brings a great deal of admiration. I do not see any immediate area that could require a lot more advancements, but I am sure BMC will be looking to maybe improving certain criteria depending really on the given spectrum of a specific environment. Maybe looking into an ad hoc assessment for certain environments could be suitable to address what areas could be addressed differently. Regarding needed improvements for BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, people always love to see more criteria of functionality, but those are things that maybe could be addressed in different ways. The flexibility of dashboards is really fantastic. Maybe that is one area that everybody might have a different way of looking at a dashboard, but customizing dashboard capabilities has always been an area of discussion. Outside of that, the sustainability of the features available today, given the spectrum that each version brings different type of updates and what have you, could utilize a lot more than a single opinion. It could maybe take a group discussion, it could take cross-functional type of sessions to really brainstorm about what areas will be in need of improvements. The overall solution brings, in parallel to ITIL 4 continuous improvement strategies, a great traction on how we can focus on continuous improvements at large. Hopefully we can see more in the future. Having the capabilities to integrate with microservices architecture really brought the cost reduction benefit right at the top of the scale for many agencies where they grant flexibility, realizing only needed resources at the cloud, and the deployments have been very agile, bringing everybody into a fast and unique agile sense of doing business. Improving the business confidence has been also another area that we had utilized a great amount of feedback in that regard.
reviewer2317098 - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Offers effective monitoring of resources but lacks the ability to connect to an AWS instance and write custom queries.
We use it mainly for monitoring, including CPU, memory, and disk space, and for troubleshooting purposes We've set up alerts to notify us when performance deviates from the baseline we've configured for each resource. So, whenever that happens, we get an alert and can investigate immediately. So,…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is evolving more and more into artificial intelligence."
"BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps' predictive analytics positively impacted proactive problem-solving capabilities. It has been the most interesting part of the solution! It provides detailed analytics that gives you a deep understanding of your infrastructure and recurring issues/problems. It really predicts the problems."
"That gave us a very positive image as an agile vendor that came in and brought a highly valuable solution that drove cost reduction, that drove better return on investment, that drove more business confidence and highly automated spectrum and also it did improve overall cybersecurity aspects of the operations as well."
"BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps has positively impacted my organization by reducing our emergency changes and flipping our problem records from reactive to proactive, so we're getting to things faster before they impact users."
"The service operations monitoring features are valuable."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that BMC Helix Monitor is an agentless tool, because of which you don't need to deploy agents on each and every system in your IT environment."
"I would advise other customers to use BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps because it really helps reduce time and cost, and I receive excellent customer support from BMC for this product."
"BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps deserves a ten out of ten."
"SQL DM made troubleshooting much easier and allowed multiple people to look into an issue with confidence."
"The best part of SQL DM is the ability to customize alerts and counters. This allows our team to find an issue then alert on the issue at a granular level."
"The ability to go back and look at historical data is the most valuable feature."
"Memory and CPU utilization features are good."
"The most valuable features are disk space projections for planning, and also the Snapshotting ability, to look back in time, to see what was going on the server at a particular time. It's basically the output of an sp_who2."
"Monitors and alerts on our mission critical instances in real-time on a 24/7 basis."
"We're able to diagnose issues prior to their actually becoming issues. Without the alerting, we wouldn't have a clue as to what was going to happen. With the alerting, it gives us a heads-up that a specific threshold has been met, and we need to take specific action."
 

Cons

"The biggest challenge is ensuring the customer has sufficient ITSM maturity to get the most out of the solution. BMC Helix is very sophisticated, and some clients lack that internal process maturity."
"The initial setup of the solution is complex."
"I feel that the tool's stability has some scope for improvement."
"My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps is that licensing in some cases can be ambiguous, but broadly speaking, it's slightly on the expensive side, though it's very high value."
"The product must provide more information and dashboards."
"Customizing dashboard capabilities has always been an area of discussion."
"The solution's GUI and some patching-related information are areas with shortcomings where enhancements are needed, though I believe they are areas that fall under BMC's roadmap for the future."
"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."
"It would helpful if SQL DM could mark when changes are made within the program."
"We don't find that it helps us with performance monitoring and diagnostics. We find that SentryOne does that better. Also, in terms of alerts, we had to customize them dramatically so that we didn't get alerted on every little thing."
"The initial setup gives too many user rights to the server, so you have to put a user that is part administrator's group - that's the preferred way - on each server, which is kind of a risk. You want to do least privilege and you're not doing that."
"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 detail or 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."
"They can improve checking the status of the CPU, memory, and IO utilization from each task."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"BMC solution is cheaper than ServiceNow, its main competitor. So, I'd rate the pricing a seven out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"The product’s price could be improved."
"The pricing is reasonable, it's comparable with the competitors."
"We were upgraded to Premium Support without their actually asking us, when we were quoted. Then I asked for Standard Support and that they had to re-quote us that. But they don't do that by default. They upcharge you by default, which I didn't think was very nice, without even asking."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
Wholesaler/Distributor
6%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
Insurance Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps?
BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps' predictive analytics positively impacted proactive problem-solving capabilities. It has been the most interesting part of the solution! It provides detai...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps is that licensing in some cases can be ambiguous, but broadly speaking, it's slightly on the exp...
What needs improvement with BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps?
I have worked in an R&D environment where we have continuous research and continuous development focus on how to improve specific aspects of a specific offering, whether it is a product or a se...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

BMC Helix Monitor
IDERA SQL DM, IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Grupo Moura, Goodman, Aspect, Telefónica Colombia, Fujitsu
Padnos, University of Notre Dame, D4, Infeon Technologies, Chevron, LC Waikiki, Sisters of Saint Francis Health Services, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, CVE, Colorado State University, St. Charles, Chaucer PLC, 1-800-Flowers, Ancoris, Money Management, National Opinion Research Center, California Department of Health, Plexus; Aviva, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, CBS, Comcast, Google, Merck, Regions Financial, Schneider Electric, Tata Consultancy Services, Verizon Communications, Zurich Financial Services
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps vs. IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
879,443 professionals have used our research since 2012.