Quest Foglight for Databases Reviews

I primarily use the solution for database monitoring, specifically for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Postgres, SAP HANA, and AWS Redshift.

I find it extremely helpful to use Foglight to triage any database issues, specifically performance issues using what Foglight calls PI investigator. It is a very powerful workload analysis tool that helps me understand where bottlenecks are. It allows me to see performance issues as end users report them. It can save time and effort when doing root cause analysis. It enables me to obtain information quicker and easier compared to manually compiling it.

Foglight provides us with a near-real-time activity database. It's not 100% real-time. It has less than a minute latency. It allows us to see performance issues as end-users report them. 

We started seeing benefits pretty much immediately. 

We use Foglight to display intensive databases. However, it's not something we monitor regularly. It's only something we kind of dig into as we troubleshoot and triage issues. It does help us determine potential IT help issues. 

When we use Foglight, we find it helps drill down holistically into potential bottlenecks. It helps us to see what is going on in the database.

Foglight allows us to monitor multiple database platforms. We use, for example, Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, Amazon Redshift, and SAP HANA. It gives us insight into our entire landscape of production workloads in near real-time.

The solution saves costs when performing root cause analysis. It can save time and effort when doing root cause analysis. It allows us to obtain information quicker and easier than by manually compiling information.

We use Foglight for database engines and Google servers. We use it in a private cloud, our cloud provider is Google Cloud Platform. Foglight is centralized in our data center, from there, we send it to different branches and regions of the country.

We've been using Foglight for four years now, and it has allowed us to identify the problem areas when our platform starts to degrade and see what kind of blockages exist in our engines. 

We are using version 5.9.5 as well as 5.9.7. Ours is a huge database infra so we are using two different environments to monitor our corporate and store servers.

We have thousands of DB servers that have to be monitored across our environment, which includes Lowe's stores across the U.S. We support the infra and the monitoring for all the stores and the store-related applications, as well as the servers which support those applications. With the DB servers being an integral part of all those applications, we thought we should have a separate monitoring tool just to monitor them.

Foglight ensures that we have a dedicated monitoring tool to monitor all our store and corporate DB servers.

There is something called SQL PI which Foglight offers, although it is only used for Oracle and SQL servers at this point in time. But that feature is really helpful for us in terms of assessing the performance of a database, or to see what kind of consumption is happening which could cause performance issues in a database. To an extent, Foglight is helping us to find the root cause. From a very high-level overview, across the whole Lowe's organization, if you ask me what kind of SQL query is taking a very long time to run and that might trigger a performance issue, we are able to access that from Foglight. In terms of metrics, we look at the tablespace data, the database space, the log space, as well as the availability rates of the databases, up or down, and how often downtime is occurring. These are some of the critical metrics which help us to measure the performance and increase the performance of the databases if required.

We have more than seven different types of platforms in Foglight. The fact that it enables us to monitor multiple platforms is a really cool feature. It gives us a single pane of glass to look at all the different types of databases in one place. That helps our database teams. We are the monitoring team that provides the monitoring solutions for our customers who are the different types of DB guys or DB teams. We are monitoring Oracle, SQL, MongoDB, Db2, Sybase, and Cassandra databases. Foglight gives all these DB teams a single tool to log into and look at the databases. They can see the performance of a database at any point in time, or they can take a look at the alerts for their databases. While the teams don't use it proactively to see if there are any long-running queries, they can always pull a report for the past month or so and see what kinds of queries are taking a very long time. That can help the database guys to ensure that the SQL query performance is improved. It also has a feature, out-of-the-box, to display long-running queries, which is really helpful.

We use Quest Foglight for Databases for production monitoring of our databases, including Postgres, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL. We proactively manage our customer databases that support our SaaS application.

We had some licensing constraints with our previous solution Idera. When we crafted the contract with Quest on Foglight, we were able to go from basically 30% coverage of our production environment to 100% coverage. We have better visibility into the environment since putting it in place.

We implemented the solution’s Angular UI. It took us a day to do it, and we just stepped in and started using it. It was pretty straightforward and easy. The overall data availability in the Angular UI is good. We are not seeing any gaps from the legacy UI to the new UI for the things that we were relying on. Everything that we expected to be there is there. It proactively alerts us of long-running queries.

In terms of the capability to quickly diagnose and resolve emerging issues, some things are disconnected from the rest of our observability platform. It takes a few steps to get from incident to resolution, but once we step into Foglight, we are able to quickly get to the data that we need to understand what is going on.

It provides real-time activity data. We run a 24/7 shop. If there are any database performance issues, we have to act on them pretty quickly.

We do not use it much to display intensive database queries. It is not really our core use case, but when we are troubleshooting application performance, it does get used in that manner at times.

It enables us to drill down and see what is causing the issue to an extent. Because we run a dynamic ORM, it is a little difficult to ascertain exactly what is happening from a database query perspective, but that has nothing to do with the tool itself. It is more about how we dynamically generate the SQL queries.

It enables us to monitor multiple database platforms. We have Microsoft SQL Server, Postgres, and MySQL. Prior to having Quest Foglight for Databases, we did not have anything centralized to provide this level of insight into our platform, and we now have it.

It does exactly what it is supposed to do, and it does not do anything more, which is what we want. We do not want it to start venturing outside of what it is good at and what it is built for.

A lot of things that Foglight does could be derived from DMVs and extended events. I'm going to sound like a salesperson, but I have to be a salesperson to sell the value of a product to my company. They need to understand that to answer some of the questions they ask, not having a tool like this will make my answers very speculative.

As a DBA, you have to be able to answer three questions. The first is: What's happening right now? Why is the system slow or why are things not responding? That is probably the most trivial for an experienced DBA. That is where the tool's value might not be as obvious, as you can look at the sp_who or DMV and pretty much tell what's going on without having to pay money for a license for a product like Foglight.

The second question is: What just happened? There could be just a couple of seconds difference between the first and second questions. But the effort to answer the second question is significantly higher because it is water under the bridge. You need some kind of monitoring solution implemented, even if it's just a basic solution where you capture a certain timeframe, so you can roll back and review what just happened. However, there will still be a significant amount of speculation because, usually, you can't afford to monitor every single metric, and there are hundreds of them. The issue could be the OS, it could be infrastructure-related, or it could be that the SQL code is not performing well because it's not written well. So the second question is significantly harder to answer, and that's where a tool like this will become very helpful.

The third question is: What has been going on? That is by far the hardest question to answer without this type of tool. This is the type of question a manager might ask for the purposes of resource planning. Or a senior VP might say, "Hey, how are we doing? Can we bring on another customer? Can we sustain a 20 percent increase in workload?" I don't know how I would answer that question without having this type of solution. I work in the industry quite a bit and there is, unfortunately, a lot of misunderstanding due to a lack of a comprehensive view of infrastructure.

There's no way to answer that question without getting some kind of baseline tool. Unfortunately, in most of the shops I work for, only one question is usually being answered relatively accurately, and that is "What is going on?" And it's a luxury because by the time a customer escalates an issue and it gets interpreted by support people, there's a gap. That gap could be a couple of minutes, a couple of hours, or a couple of days.

Ultimately, when you negotiate how many licenses you need, you always find the most problematic instances. You also have to also evaluate the culture and maturity of an organization. Unfortunately, there is often a lot of legacy code to maintain. It's not always easy to identify those things quickly.

In that context, Foglight has been pretty spectacular in terms of the number of times I have been able to answer questions that nobody could answer before. I used the tool and showed my team how you use the tool to answer a lot of those questions, and some of those questions were pretty complex. We'll have deadlocks, we'll have locking conflicts, we will have blocking, and we'll have unexpected CPU spikes. Obviously, there is some complexity involved with the architecture and that is not always clear, but the tool is phenomenally helpful in enabling us to change and repair things.

We have also been able to predict a problem. A lot of times you can see a particular process starting to misbehave. Visually, you can see the spike, and it is something that could potentially lead to a bigger problem because the process will not scale. It gives you an opportunity to address things before they become real problems.

When it comes to displaying intensive database queries, Foglight is the best tool. Spotlight does not do that very well and Foglight is fantastic. It enables what they call a multidimensional analysis. You have a visual presentation of query resource utilization and you can slice it by the type of resource. You can also slice it by the number of executions.

For example, a few times I've seen a server running very hot, the CPU would be 80-plus percent, and people are starting to freak out. But in reality, the box is very healthy. It has no locks or blocking. Rather, it's utilizing the CPU because that's what you want it to do. You always need to juxtapose multiple metrics simultaneously, and Foglight is really good for that. It has a dashboard where you can look at multiple parameters and components at the same time. If I see the CPU goes up and I also see the number of connections goes up and the number of batches per second goes up, to me it just means that SQL Server is working hard because we are processing fast and we are able to have more work done in a particular time frame.

A lot of times, when you do have problems, you actually see the CPU go down. People say, "Well, what's the problem?" The problem is that you have some internal blocking or locking, or some kind of resource contention, and the CPU cannot process as many batches per second.

When it comes to identifying the least performant queries, or queries that are performant but that are just very hyper with a lot of calls to them, that is where the tool really shines. It allows you to identify those things quickly.

Foglight is used by our company to monitor production and development databases. It's being used to alert us if there are any database issues, including availability and those that are server-related. We also use Foglight SQL PI (Performance Investigator) features to troubleshoot any performance issues.

There are very specific database alerts that Foglight provides, to make us aware of an issue before it becomes a production issue. It can prevent us from having a production outage, which, if one were to happen, would increase our cost of business or decrease revenue flow. Foglight has the effect of improving our overall productivity, reducing downtime, and increasing profits.

It also enables us to monitor multiple database platforms, including Oracle, SQL Server, Db2, and MySQL. In the future, we will add Postgres to the monitoring tool. It gives us one platform with one interface to look at the entire enterprise, which promotes efficiency and ease of use.

Foglight's ability to quickly diagnose and resolve emerging issues is almost indispensable. That is especially true for SQL Server which has a very limited number of tools that you can use to drill down into issues. You can only do a limited number of things in SQL Server. Foglight has been extremely useful for us for troubleshooting emerging issues in SQL Server.

In addition, we use the solution to display intensive database queries and that has been very useful. We can find out which queries are high consumers and find out why they're using so many resources, or we can contact the user to find out what they were doing and see if they can stop what they're doing.

We use it as a monitoring tool, which is what it's designed for. And we generally only scratch the surface of it. We use it for checking blocking and locking deadlocks, server activity, database activity, running baselines, et cetera. We don't constantly look at it; we only look at it if we've noticed a problem. It could be something that might be brought to our attention where a particular database might not be running as fast as it should. The first thing we jump into is fog Foglight to see if anything jumps out at us.

We have it running locally inside our server room and have three instances of it. Two of them are current, one of them is going to get updated next week.

One of the benefits we see from it is the fact that it already has an answer for us without us really having to ask around. I jump right to that baseline chart and I can show everybody that, between this time and that time, the databases were running as they should be. That way, we know we have to look at something outside of the database as being the issue.

Foglight definitely saves us time when it comes to root cause analysis. We have one senior DBA who will also run some code within SQL Server to double-check a few things, but for the most part he will jump right into Foglight and use that to try to pinpoint where the problem is. He will then take any code he finds in there and throw it into SQL Server to decipher things there.

We use it to monitor about 500 instances, 500 servers, and it keeps up with everything. I monitor Foglight. I wake up in the morning and it's the first thing I look at, because I can depend on it.

We have it on VMs in-house and it performs very well.

The solution has nothing to do with how the organization functions. It has a lot to do with how I do my job, and how I can help the organization stay on top of things. I need to know, from the ground up, what's going on and when it is happening. The tool allows me to know that. I don't know that the company realizes the value of it. Of course they do, because they're paying for it, but the DBA team, for sure, knows the value of it.

It allows me to do more than I could otherwise. The tool does your job for you in a lot of ways. If I had to collect all that information myself about 500 different instances, I'd need a year to do it. It does that every day. Now, I'm free to fight those fights and still have time to do the upgrades and do the other things, the fun stuff, including building stuff, instead of just troubleshooting all the time. It brings with it a growth factor too, for any DBA that wants to show their value. Just watching a monitored screen is not going to provide much value, in the eyes of the bosses. But when you can do that and do upgrades and other stuff in a week, then you start to show value. It provides you time to do everything else because it does so much.

We also get emails from Foglight every day about long running queries, long running jobs, and broken jobs. Again, it's really doing my job for me. I just have to respond to it. It tells me what I need to do and I do it.

We can also drill down and do root cause analysis for most things. That's a huge benefit of the tool. We mostly have Windows boxes. Between the drill-down for root cause and Event Viewer, you can decipher what the root cause of anything was, or just prove what it was. The same information comes out of Foglight that would come out of Event Viewer. It saves us tons of time. I couldn't do all of my job in one week if I didn't have the tool. The company would probably have to hire another person if we didn't have it.