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Quest Foglight for Databases vs SQL Sentry comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

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

Quest Foglight for Databases
Ranking in Database Development and Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SQL Sentry
Ranking in Database Development and Management
10th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
2
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 Quest Foglight for Databases is 8.2%, up from 7.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SQL Sentry is 5.6%, down from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Database Development and Management
 

Featured Reviews

Stuart Dairiki - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
SM
Lets you know when your jobs are taking longer than average and allows you to go back in history and find out what was happening at certain times
To be able to go back in history and find out what was happening at certain times is the most valuable feature of the product. Another thing that's good about the product is that it will let you know when your jobs are taking longer than average so that you can foretell that there's going to be an issue coming up. Your SQL agent job is taking longer.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The platform is very stable."
"The alarms alert proactively if there are any potential or ongoing issues with the databases that we support. That means we can take preventive or corrective action before the issue becomes a big issue. And the SQL PI features enable us to drill down into performance issues in our databases so that we can improve performance, which is important."
"The PI module allows [my colleague] to identify which new indexes or modified indexes are going to make the biggest impact."
"The profiler allows us to look at the profiles of the database queries that are being run over time. It allows us to go back to our customers and say that these are some of the queries causing them some headaches. It gives us the opportunity to provide suggestions on how to improve their experience."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"To be able to go back in history and find out what was happening at certain times is the most valuable feature of the product."
"This solution has identified blocking, deadlock, memory pressure, and high CPU consumption issues."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"The monitoring capabilities for Postgres should be at par with SQL Server. This is the area where we push back on our Quest representative. We want more insights into Postgres."
"I would like the rule development code to be made available so we don't always have to be referred to professional services for custom solutions. For example, if we want to exclude certain databases from a particular rule, we shouldn't have to go to support and to professional services for that solution. If the code and syntax were available, we have resources that could quickly turn something like that around."
"It would be amazing if they could enable the "Performance Investigator" functionality across all database platforms."
"It would be amazing if they could enable the 'Performance Investigator' functionality across all database platforms."
"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."
"There could be some more metrics on the high availability to let us know when there are issues synchronizing between the hosts."
"If we can get details on wait types from system views, it will help identify a more detailed root cause."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Compared to the other tools on the market, Foglight is okay in terms of pricing and licensing."
"The price is worth it, if you have the time to go through the information."
"It's fairly expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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.
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...
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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Overview

 

Sample Customers

CommitDBA
Coeo, Stack Overflow, GreatAmerica Financial Services Corporation, Hawaiian Airlines, Hennepin County Medical Center, Racing Victoria, Citrix, Insight, Shi, Woodforest National Bank, Telular
Find out what your peers are saying about Quest Foglight for Databases vs. SQL Sentry and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,207 professionals have used our research since 2012.