CA Datacom vs Quest Foglight for Databases comparison

Broadcom and Quest Software are both solutions in the Database Development and Management category. Broadcom is ranked #25, while Quest Software is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2. Broadcom holds a 1.4% mindshare in DDM, compared to Quest Software’s 8.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Broadcom users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Quest Software users who would recommend it.

CA Datacom

Read 7 CA Datacom reviews

171 Views
100 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Quest Foglight for Databases

Read 14 Quest Foglight for Databases reviews

2,055 Views
795 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

CA Datacom

Quest Foglight for Databases

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

CA Datacom and Quest Foglight for Databases are competing products in database management and monitoring solutions. Quest Foglight appears to have the upper hand with its comprehensive feature set, outweighing its higher cost compared to CA Datacom's lower pricing and strong support.

Features: CA Datacom is distinguished by its high-performance database capabilities, exceptional transaction processing, and VSAM-Transparency option for converting files into tables. Quest Foglight for Databases offers real-time database monitoring, a single pane of glass for diverse databases, and an adaptive baseline for performance monitoring, allowing detailed insights into database health and performance.

Room for Improvement: CA Datacom could enhance scalability options and ease of online maintainability, while also streamlining user interfaces for modern expectations. Quest Foglight requires improvements in UI for intuitive use, better integration with newer database technologies, and reduced complexity in initial setup processes.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CA Datacom offers an easy deployment process and robust customer support, making it user-friendly for organizations with limited technical resources. Quest Foglight, although having a slightly more complex deployment process, provides extensive documentation and support resources, ensuring it caters to professionals needing in-depth monitoring solutions.

Pricing and ROI: CA Datacom is positioned as a cost-effective option with a satisfactory ROI, targeting organizations with budget restrictions. Quest Foglight, despite a higher initial cost, offers substantial long-term ROI, thanks to its advanced feature set and significant improvements in database performance over time.

To learn more, read our detailed CA Datacom vs. Quest Foglight for Databases Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

CA Datacom vs. Quest Foglight for Databases

April 2025

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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

CA Datacom

Ranking in Database Development and Management

25th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Quest Foglight for Databases

Ranking in Database Development and Management

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Database Development and Management category, the mindshare of CA Datacom is 1.4%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quest Foglight for Databases is 8.2%, up from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database Development and Management

Featured Reviews

it_user779310

Mainframe Systems Administrator at Total System Services, Inc.

It is a stable product that cuts down on our support costs

This is a hard one. It has just been a really solid product. We have not had very many issues at all with it. The only minor issue that we have had with Datacom is in the installation guide: Some of the sizings for the databases have not really worked out for us, so we had to go in and resize them. Also, we would run out of space and things like that. Those are the only minor things.

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Stuart Dairiki

Senior IT Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Empowers efficient database monitoring and performance troubleshooting with powerful workload analysis

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.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"It is a solid product."

"Nowadays, CA is doing a lot of improving as far as online maintainability of definitions, which is a huge improvement over the past. I'm able to do a lot of changes without any outage."

"Scalability is definitely one thing. The size of the database can grow without any issues. We've got one database table that's got over a billion rows in it; quite a bit of data, and it handles access like a champ."

"The initial setup is fairly straightforward for a mainframe product."

"It definitely cuts down on our support costs. I do not get woken up in the middle of the night very often for a problem with Datacom."

"Foglight's Change Tracking capabilities are another huge feature. It is wonderful to be able to do that. People don't realize the amount of information that Foglight gathers from a given server or instance. It gets down to the version of SQL, the disk array, everything that's there. Any change that's made, any upgrade to SQL, shows up on the dashboard almost immediately. You don't know how much time you save just having a tool in your back pocket that does that for you."

"The ability to monitor multiple database platforms streamlines our database operations. The single pane of glass is what we were really after when we picked Foglight. We knew we wanted something that could monitor cross-platform because it does save a lot of time to use the same tool. The one thing that I like with Foglight is that we don't have to install anything locally, like agents, directly on the database servers. That was also a big seller because it simplifies things."

"Its reporting capabilities are immense."

"The real-time activity screens are also helpful... if there is something that is running slowly, we can eliminate the database as being an issue and perhaps look at the server, network activity, or something outside of the realm of the database as being the issue."

"Foglight is also able to help the DBAs proactively fix problems before they become an issue. It provides them with real-time activity screens that help in this regard. The DBAs are able to go to these screens and look at what's happening in real time, and that buys them time. It helps them see problems ahead of time and find solutions to them."

"The platform is very stable."

"We went from basically 30% coverage of our production environment to 100% coverage."

"The most valuable feature is the in-depth capability SQL Performance Investigator provides. It allows you to drill down to the smallest detail that occurs on our platform. It does a highly detailed and atomic follow-up of what one wants to look for in relation to time and our different instances."

More Quest Foglight for Databases pros

Cons

"For the "no-outage maintainability" of things, they are making improvements as we speak, but there is definitely still room for more of that."

"The only minor issue that we have had with Datacom is in the installation guide: Some of the sizings for the databases have not really worked out for us, so we had to go in and resize them."

"When we decided to go with Foglight, a lot of people stopped using the diagnostics part because it was very intimidating... They still won't use it because they feel it's too intimidating. They will open something up and not know what to do. It's not very user-friendly. You have to click on a lot of stuff to find the information."

"When holding data for two years for 20 SQL Servers, the reporting becomes sluggish and unresponsive."

"The version that I'm using is not the latest version, so there might have been some improvement, but the OS monitoring is a bit lacking, and the high-availability option is a bit complicated to set up and it doesn't work all the time."

"One thing that I would like, and it's probably something that I could set up internally, is something other than a dashboard which I have to look at to know that a server is down. I'd like bells and whistles to go off... If I look at the dashboard I know there's a server down. But if I'm not looking at it, if I'm looking at some other problem, I want to know about it. You can do that, you can use SMSs and alerts to your phone, and I could set it up to handle that, but it would be nice if, out-of-the-box, Foglight did that."

"Foglight does have a component that allows you to look at things in real time, but it's not as friendly or as efficient in terms of responsiveness as Quest Spotlight is. Foglight might be lacking in this department."

"The system is not that stable. We have been facing a lot of issues. We built a new store environment of Foglight, an environment for monitoring the Lowe's store servers, which are all Db2 servers. The objective is to monitor 800 Db2 servers in each Foglight instance. Up to 150 Db2 servers, the environment was working fine. The moment it crossed 150 or 160, we started having a lot of stability issues."

"Better communication and alerts regarding the transaction logs getting full would also be beneficial. What I have noticed is that if the log files on the SQL server are full, we cannot log in and have to do some cleanup on the Foglight DB. It would be good if they could monitor that and alert us when it is getting too full."

"Quest must release a Spanish version. That's critical because not everyone speaks English in Latin America. It's an excellent product, so it's super important that they offer the application and customer service in Spanish."

More Quest Foglight for Databases cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"It is cost-effective. With our EA, it is really based on the scale of our database environment. We found the Quest team to be reasonable and flexible when it comes to pricing and scaling of licenses."

"This is like the "Cadillac" of performance monitoring software. It's not cheap... I am currently with a company that I was able to convince that the product is worth the cost."

"Pricing is very reasonable. We were able to construct a pretty easy contract with Quest, who were very easy to work with and very amenable to what we are trying to do. It worked out well for us."

"The price of Foglight could be a little more competitive in Chile, and it should be lowered for long-time customers— at least by 20 percent. Sometimes the price is a limitation. We have seven instances and nearly 5 million users. If Quest Foglight could reduce its prices for the clients that have been with it for a long time, we would be able to have more instances."

"The price is worth it, if you have the time to go through the information."

"Compared to the other tools on the market, Foglight is okay in terms of pricing and licensing."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

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Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Quest Foglight for Databases?

The pricing is palatable. We've already done one renewal and we are in our second contract. We're happy thus far.

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What needs improvement with Quest Foglight for Databases?

It would be amazing if they could enable the "Performance Investigator" functionality across all database platforms. I've been talking to their product development team about enhancements that I wo...

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What is your primary use case for Quest Foglight for Databases?

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

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Database Development and Management

April 2025

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Quest Foglight for Databases

March 2025

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Also Known As

DATACOM

No data available

Overview

CA Datacom enables the continuous availability of your business applications. Datacom, and its family of rDBMS products, provides you with a reliable database repository with enterprise-wide, high-volume workload and fault-tolerant capabilities.

Broadcom

Foglight identifies and resolves performance issues across your applications, databases and virtual environments. The Foglight family of products easily integrates with your existing tools, so you can monitor and analyze data from almost any source across your infrastructure and view it through a single interface with our customizable, unified monitoring platform

Quest Software

Sample Customers

Blue Hill Data Services Inc.

CommitDBA

Buyer's Guide

CA Datacom vs. Quest Foglight for Databases

April 2025

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