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BMC TrueSight vs IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 8, 2026

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 TrueSight
Ranking in Event Monitoring
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (28th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (31st), Cloud Monitoring Software (25th), AIOps (11th)
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 March 2026, in the Event Monitoring category, the mindshare of BMC TrueSight is 7.1%, down from 10.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server is 3.1%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Event Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BMC TrueSight7.1%
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server3.1%
Other89.8%
Event Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Has improved monitoring efficiency and supports fast issue resolution through responsive support and reliable automation
I work with BMC TrueSight and have been using it for eight-plus years BMC TrueSight brought a positive impact and benefits to our organization. The customization part is one of the advantages of the product, along with the monitoring capabilities. Automated root cause analysis and predictive…
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

"The Event Management is outstanding; still is the most interesting part of the product."
"Its event management capabilities are very open and flexible. I haven't seen a use case scenario with a customer that we couldn't actually solve the problem for, so it's really good. There are some interesting things that happen in an enterprise network (things that people don't normally expect), and the event management product is very flexible. You can solve problems as far as your imagination can go with it."
"It works irrespective of the operating system we’re running."
"The most valuable feature of BMC TrueSight Operations Management is the dashboard presentation server."
"The most valuable features of the solution are alert management, alert generation, and event management."
"It allows our operations team to have one single application to reference when investigating issues in our environment."
"Helix Innovation Studio is a very good feature. It allows us to develop our own enterprise applications and make them available for the customers."
"The ability to fulfill the role as a manager of managers is fantastic."
"Monitors and alerts on our mission critical instances in real-time on a 24/7 basis."
"SQL DM made troubleshooting much easier and allowed multiple people to look into an issue with confidence."
"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."
"Memory and CPU utilization features are good."
"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."
"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."
"Baselining our SQL Servers has made a huge impact."
"Ability to identify bottlenecks, deadlocks and slow running queries and run monthly and daily reports."
 

Cons

"We were somewhat limited in TrueSight due to some of the RBAC controls not quite being what we wanted as far as delegating out administrative privileges for implementation. But because we were able to turn requests around pretty well, that burden wasn't too heavy."
"BMC's solutions for cloud monitoring (monitoring of AWS and Azure resources) are very poor in stability and customization."
"One of the things that the TrueSight environment is missing is some of the HA abilities. The data collection server called the ISM doesn't really have the HA functionality or workload balancing. It was missing from the previous product as well. It's missing redundancy."
"The solution is a little obsolete."
"The product must provide more AI capabilities."
"In a large company of our size, we need multiple people in our company trained. So, I have to take the training classes. Then, I have to go and train the rest of my organization. I would prefer to say to the other people on my team, "Go to this link and..." Or, "Here's a list of training sessions that you can go to which are online and that are free." I think it would help the adoption of their product in the marketplace, personally."
"I would like to see a little more out-of-the-box event correlation and expanded AIOps type capabilities. Where you can train your artificial intelligence operations to be able to memorize an issue once you encounter one scenario, so if you encounter that same problem, you can get to the root cause very quickly."
"The solution should improve predicting events and flaws in service. It also needs to improve integration with other systems."
"It would helpful if SQL DM could mark when changes are made within the program."
"It would helpful if SQL DM could mark when changes are made within the program."
"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."
"Some more granularity in alerting."
"Reporting and overall analysis of data gathered from SQL Server."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a big upfront cost when you buy the license, then there is annual maintenance. We look at, if I bought a license and paid for maintenance for five years, then average it out, what would be my monthly cost. We have had some of the competing tools come in around four dollars. This is coming in as a premium, which is why I don't have it deployed as I would like it. Therefore, we're in negotiations right now. If I can get it down to the four dollar range, I will triple my deployment in a year and a half."
"The cost depends on the usage."
"BMC TrueSight Operations Management is not on the cheaper side, but its pricing is on a case by case basis. Its licensing model is simple and based on the number of devices."
"It is a relatively inexpensive solution."
"Annual licensing amount depends on the customers requirements. Support is an additional fee and there are options for three and five year support."
"It is a large, complex product. So, there is a commitment of manpower to deploy it, as it is not a cheap product."
"Other products are more expensive than BMC TrueSight."
"Though I have no clue about the tool's actual price, I know that it is astronomical."
"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
19%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Government
6%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise24
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise4
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BMC TrueSight Operations Management?
The solution provides visibility to our infrastructure, how it is, the resources we are monitoring, and quick updates when it has any problems. We have integrated it with ServiceNow to open instances.
What needs improvement with BMC TrueSight Operations Management?
There are some complexities with deployment that could be improved in BMC TrueSight.
Ask a question
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Also Known As

ProactiveNet, TrueSight Operations Management
IDERA SQL DM, IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ensono, Transamerica, Boston Scientific, Park Place Technologies, inContact, TD Ameritrade, PNC Bank
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 TrueSight vs. IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.