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SolarWinds Enhances Plan Explorer

SolarWinds announced enhancements to Plan Explorer®, its tool for analyzing query performance in Microsoft® SQL Server® environments.

This free product helps database professionals analyze query execution plans to improve database performance and drive better technical efficiency in their data ecosystems.

The Plan Explorer tool helps database teams find the root of query problems in Microsoft SQL Server. Plan Explorer provides insights by graphically delivering query execution plans in helpful plan comparisons, as well as color and layout options for diagrams. It also has a number of performance-tuning capabilities:

- Runtime metrics unavailable in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)

- Index scoring and histogram analysis

- Live query profile with resource charts

- Wait statistics with links to the SQLskills wait type library

- Full query call stack for dynamic SQL and iterative queries

- Session history, versioning, and comments

- Unique analysis and visualization of deadlocks

Plan Explorer is also natively built into the SolarWinds SQL Sentry® product. By combining the Plan Explorer tool's detailed query plan analysis with the comprehensive monitoring and diagnostics of SQL Sentry, database administrators and developers can achieve a more effective approach to managing SQL Server performance. This dual approach helps ensure immediate query performance improvement and long-term SQL Server performance, stability, and efficiency.

The powerful new SolarWinds® Plan Explorer upgrades enable teams to optimize query performance and resolve deadlocks more swiftly and efficiently and include:

- Compatibility with SQL Server 2022: Plan Explorer has expanded its performance analysis capabilities to fully support SQL Server 2022. With this support, Plan Explorer maintains its high standard of performance analysis, helping ensure users can maximize the benefits of the latest SQL Server features.

- Enhanced visibility with plan guide indication: Plan Explorer now provides insights into query execution. The feature demystifies the often complex execution plans, making it easier to identify potential performance bottlenecks and apply targeted optimizations.

- Streamlined deadlock investigation: Users can now dissect deadlock events, understand their root causes, and implement corrective measures more efficiently.

- Revamped start page: The start page of Plan Explorer has been redesigned to offer a more intuitive user experience and encourage community engagement with easy access to documentation, industry events, and information about other SolarWinds solutions.

SolarWinds has continued to innovate its powerful database management solutions to provide customers with amplified visibility, more seamless integrations, and the ability to redefine the capabilities of the database environment as it becomes increasingly complicated. The company recently announced major enhancements to its comprehensive database performance monitoring and DataOps solution, SQL Sentry. These include introducing query-level wait statistics and a revamped Environmental Health Overview dashboard that enables organizations to identify and prevent database performance issues.

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SolarWinds Enhances Plan Explorer

SolarWinds announced enhancements to Plan Explorer®, its tool for analyzing query performance in Microsoft® SQL Server® environments.

This free product helps database professionals analyze query execution plans to improve database performance and drive better technical efficiency in their data ecosystems.

The Plan Explorer tool helps database teams find the root of query problems in Microsoft SQL Server. Plan Explorer provides insights by graphically delivering query execution plans in helpful plan comparisons, as well as color and layout options for diagrams. It also has a number of performance-tuning capabilities:

- Runtime metrics unavailable in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)

- Index scoring and histogram analysis

- Live query profile with resource charts

- Wait statistics with links to the SQLskills wait type library

- Full query call stack for dynamic SQL and iterative queries

- Session history, versioning, and comments

- Unique analysis and visualization of deadlocks

Plan Explorer is also natively built into the SolarWinds SQL Sentry® product. By combining the Plan Explorer tool's detailed query plan analysis with the comprehensive monitoring and diagnostics of SQL Sentry, database administrators and developers can achieve a more effective approach to managing SQL Server performance. This dual approach helps ensure immediate query performance improvement and long-term SQL Server performance, stability, and efficiency.

The powerful new SolarWinds® Plan Explorer upgrades enable teams to optimize query performance and resolve deadlocks more swiftly and efficiently and include:

- Compatibility with SQL Server 2022: Plan Explorer has expanded its performance analysis capabilities to fully support SQL Server 2022. With this support, Plan Explorer maintains its high standard of performance analysis, helping ensure users can maximize the benefits of the latest SQL Server features.

- Enhanced visibility with plan guide indication: Plan Explorer now provides insights into query execution. The feature demystifies the often complex execution plans, making it easier to identify potential performance bottlenecks and apply targeted optimizations.

- Streamlined deadlock investigation: Users can now dissect deadlock events, understand their root causes, and implement corrective measures more efficiently.

- Revamped start page: The start page of Plan Explorer has been redesigned to offer a more intuitive user experience and encourage community engagement with easy access to documentation, industry events, and information about other SolarWinds solutions.

SolarWinds has continued to innovate its powerful database management solutions to provide customers with amplified visibility, more seamless integrations, and the ability to redefine the capabilities of the database environment as it becomes increasingly complicated. The company recently announced major enhancements to its comprehensive database performance monitoring and DataOps solution, SQL Sentry. These include introducing query-level wait statistics and a revamped Environmental Health Overview dashboard that enables organizations to identify and prevent database performance issues.

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Pilots are everywhere, stakeholders are seeking results, businesses are pushing for new tools, and IT teams are being asked to make AI secure, reliable, and useful at scale. But as organizations move from testing AI to operationalizing it, many are discovering that the biggest barrier is not the model, the use case, or even the budget. It is the file data foundation within ...

Fast or cheap? For most of my career in engineering, speed and quality sat on opposite ends of a seesaw. The "OR" in "fast or cheap" was non-negotiable. It was expected that pushing for faster releases meant that something in quality would give way. Tightening quality controls meant the schedule slipped. Every engineering leader I know has lived some version of that tradeoff ... The seesaw is starting to level out ...

I have been building enterprise software for more than 20 years ... One thing stays true across all of it: You do not find out your foundation is wrong during the crisis. You find out when the debt comes due. For a lot of organizations, that bill is arriving now. New research ... puts hard numbers on something practitioners have been sensing for a while. The telemetry problem isn't coming. It's already here ...

The rapid growth of AI workloads is pushing traditional log management approaches to their limits, according to The State of Log Management 2026 report from Dynatrace. Modern logs have become critical to understanding, validating, and securing AI-driven decisions, helping organizations ensure reliability, compliance, and performance at scale. However, the volume and complexity of AI telemetry are overwhelming legacy tools ...

For years, secure connectivity has relied on a familiar pattern: route traffic back to centralized gateways, inspect it, and then allow access. This model worked when applications lived in a handful of data centers and users were largely confined to offices. That model is now under strain. Applications are distributed across clouds, users connect from everywhere, and real-time workloads demand performance that centralized inspection points struggle to deliver. As traffic volumes grow and latency expectations shrink, routing everything through a small number of control points has become both a performance bottleneck and a resilience risk. The future of secure connectivity requires a different approach ...

The AI experimentation phase is over, and the private cloud is where enterprise AI workloads are being deployed for security and scale, according to Private Cloud Outlook 2026, a new report from Broadcom ... 2026 marks an acceleration into a full AI tipping point. The shift is being shaped by three forces — costs, complexity, and control — that public cloud environments are increasingly failing to address for production AI at scale. Key findings from the report include ...

44% of organizations have reported an outage in the past year tied to suppressed or ignored alerts, and 78% had at least one incident where no alert was fired at all ... Engineers learned about failures from customers. That gap between what our tools report and what our customers experience is the problem DevOps teams have been quietly solving with GenAI tooling, even as most enterprises continue to run their NOCs on manual alert triage ...

Cloud outages are usually described as technical failures. When a service goes down, a dependency breaks, or a region has issues, the focus immediately shifts to infrastructure. But if you look closely at how these incidents actually unfold, the root cause is rarely the technology itself. It is almost always tied to decisions made earlier, during design, implementation, or day-to-day operations. The system behaves the way it was built. The real question is how it was built ...

77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...