Warren Estes breaks out some tooling recommendations by stacks—that is, common use cases:
The Admin stack is probably the most important stack here. You still using maintenance tasks via SSMS? stop doing that. Rebuilding indexes every night? Maybe rethink that.
How you keep track of, monitor and do basics DBA tasks?
CMS server
Ok so this can involve SSMS, but a feature not a lot of people may not use. We use it to keep track of all of our instances and push things..oh baby baaaby! It also allows me to combine PoSh to do work against instances, gather data (historical, dmv…etc) and do a boat load of admin stuff without pointing and clicking. Heck I don’t even have to open SSMS to use my CMS server at all.SentryOne SQLSentry
SQLSentry can automatically defrag indexes for you and update stats. You could use this instead of the below choices for this aspect if desired. Although not free, it’s an option we have in our environment and I love me some options.Ola hallengren/Minionware
Both amazing options for backup, reindexing and checkdb. Although most places i’ve worked use Ola’s scripts by default. HOWEVER…. Minion has some pretty nice options that are FAR more configurable than Ola’s. We have mitigated some large DB issues by rolling our own code on top of Ola’s scripts. We could avoid this by simply using Minionware!
I’m a huge fan of the Minionware suite. And several other things Warren mentions.