QUEST SPOTLIGHT ALTERNATIVE
The Quest Spotlight alternative that turns diagnosis into a plan
Spotlight shows you what’s happening on SQL Server. WISdom tells you what to do about it: 90% fewer notifications, incidents replayed with ranked fixes, capacity forecasts before you run short, migrations backed by evidence, and the dollar cost of every query.
No credit card · 30-day free trial · Cancel anytime
WHY TEAMS SWITCH
A good diagnosis, then you're on your own
Spotlight on SQL Server is a capable monitor, with playback, workload analysis, and deadlock detection. The friction teams describe starts after the diagnosis.
// alert noise
Alarms you tune by hand
Threshold alarms work on ten instances. Across hundreds, someone spends every week adjusting them, and the team learns to ignore the rest.
// incidents
Playback, then guesswork
Rewinding to the moment it broke is useful. Working out the cause, and which fix to make first, is still on the DBA at 2am.
// planning
No forecast, no migration evidence
There’s no capacity forecast, no right-sizing, and no pre/post-migration analysis, so the next hardware request or cloud move starts from a guess.
PER INSTANCE VS. PER SERVER
Spotlight meters the instance. WISdom licenses the server, with unlimited instances included.
Spotlight licenses per SQL Server instance, so a consolidated multi-instance host costs more to monitor. WISdom licenses per server or host, billed annually, with unlimited SQL Server instances on that server and every feature in one edition. One license also covers ten Azure SQL databases, and a failover cluster instance is licensed on the active node only.
SIDE BY SIDE
WISdom vs Quest Spotlight on SQL Server
Where the two overlap, and where WISdom goes further.
| Capability | WISdom | Quest Spotlight |
|---|---|---|
| Monitoring and diagnostics | ||
| Real-time performance monitoring | ✓ | ✓ |
| Wait stats and top SQL | ✓ | ✓ |
| Blocking and deadlock analysis | ✓ | ✓ |
| Always On availability group health | ✓ | ✓ |
| Minute-by-minute incident review | ranked fixes | playback |
| ML anomaly detection | ✓ | threshold alarms |
| Notification noise reduction | 90% fewer | manual alarm tuning |
| AI insights (WISdom Advisor) | ✓ | - |
| Tuning and workload | ||
| Index and query recommendations, ranked by impact | ✓ | via SQL Optimizer |
| Workload Compare (any two periods, one instance or two) | ✓ | workload analysis |
| Cloud migration sizing and cost | ✓ | - |
| Capacity planning | ||
| Capacity trends and CPU / memory sizing | ✓ | trends only |
| Server and cloud-tier right-sizing | ✓ | - |
| Storage growth planning | ✓ | disk trends |
| Cost optimization | ||
| Dollar cost of every query and stored procedure | ✓ | - |
| Tuning recommendations ranked by savings | ✓ | - |
| Chargeback and showback by team or app | ✓ | - |
| Deployment and licensing | ||
| Nothing installed on monitored servers | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hosted web console | ✓ | desktop client, on-prem server |
| Licensing unit | Per server, unlimited instances | Per instance |
Based on each vendor's publicly available product and pricing information as of October 2026. Product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.
*Already running Quest Spotlight? Add WISdom on top for the cost of technology your finance team needs.
WHAT CHANGES AFTER THE SWITCH
Monitoring that does more of the thinking
Your DBAs get fewer alerts and faster answers. Your platform owner gets a capacity plan. Finance gets a number.
// analytics
90% fewer notifications
ML anomaly detection flags what’s actually unusual, not every threshold crossing, so the alerts that reach your team are worth acting on.
// incidents
What Happened? answers it
Replay an incident minute by minute, see only the checks that flagged, the statement behind them compared against four weeks of history, and ranked steps to fix it.
// estate
Whole estate, down to the query
Start with every instance at a glance, then drop to the blocking chain, the session, or the statement in a click, with 180 days of history behind it.
// capacity
See the shortfall coming
Capacity forecasting shows when a server will run short while there’s still time to plan, and right-sizing shows where you’re paying for headroom you don’t use.
// workload
Prove the change worked
Workload Compare and pre/post-migration analysis put two periods or two environments side by side, so a release or a cloud move comes with evidence.
// cost
Every query has a price
The dollar cost of every statement and stored procedure, rolled up into chargeback and showback by team and app, so the budget conversation starts with facts.
WHO PICKS UP THE PHONE
Support from people who've run SQL Server estates
WISdom is supported by US-based SQL Server experts, including engineers from the former SQL Sentry support team, with a 95%+ CSAT.
FIND IT · FIX IT · PROVE IT
Spotlight shows you the incident. WISdom hands you the fix.
FIND IT
What actually changed
Anomalies flagged against normal behavior, with the queries and sessions behind them, ranked by impact and by cost.
FIX IT
The next step, ranked
The index, the rewrite, or the right-sized server, ordered by impact, with the projected savings shown next to it.
PROVE IT
The result, on record
Compare before and after in performance and in dollars, then hand finance a number they can check.
FAQ
Questions Quest customers ask us
Can WISdom run alongside Quest Spotlight?
Yes. WISdom is agentless and connects read-only, so nothing is installed on your SQL Server instances and it doesn’t interfere with Spotlight or its Diagnostic Server. Most teams run both during the 30-day trial and compare what each one tells them.
How is "What Happened?" different from Spotlight's playback?
Spotlight’s playback lets you rewind the dashboards to the moment something went wrong. “What Happened?” replays the incident minute by minute too, then shows only the checks that flagged, the affected statement, how it compares with the last four weeks, and ranked steps to fix it.
We also run Foglight. Where does WISdom fit?
WISdom is built for SQL Server and Azure SQL, depth over breadth. Teams running Foglight across several platforms usually start by moving their SQL Server estate, where WISdom adds ML anomaly detection, capacity forecasting, migration analysis, and query-level cost attribution. Foglight Cloud estimates infrastructure spend; WISdom attributes cost to the individual query and stored procedure.
What does WISdom cost compared with Spotlight?
WISdom publishes one price per monitored server or host, billed annually, with unlimited SQL Server instances included on that server, every feature built in, and no multi-year lock-in. Spotlight licenses per instance, so a multi-instance host costs more to monitor as you consolidate.
Can WISdom run alongside Quest Spotlight?
Yes. WISdom is agentless and connects read-only, so nothing is installed on your SQL Server instances and it doesn’t interfere with Spotlight or its Diagnostic Server. Many teams that already run Spotlight add WISdom on top of it, because WISdom complements the tools you have by showing the cost of technology for your finance and FinOps teams. Most teams run both during the 30-day trial and compare what each one tells them.
Keep the diagnosis. Add the plan.
No credit card · 30-day free trial · Cancel anytime