Quest Foglight for APM [EOL] Reviews

This product has helped our customers discover Java performance issues in their WebLogic applications.

The most valuable feature is drill-down monitoring, which shows us from one interface the transaction chain from the front end to back end. Another interesting thing is that this product can work with many databases including freeware (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL). So, it can seriously reduce TCO.

I want to see a new interface that contains HTML5 features. The current version of Foglight (on-premise edition) is so fusty in comparison with leaders of Gartner APM Quadrant - i.e. Appdynamics, NewRelic, Dynatrace. If you try to compare SaaS and on-premise Foglight versions you can see differences in UI-design. It's my subjective experiences, but SaaS version looks more modern. Hope this helps

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. This is a stable solution.

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 9/10, because 10 is an unattainable ideal. These guys are working fine and really want to help.

Initial setup is really easy. You can install this product by clicking "next-next-next", and it will work fine.

I suggest implementing this solution with the vendor or a system integrator. Otherwise, it could take a long time to find all of its interesting features and possibilities.

This is a difficult question. Many vendors have tried to calculate this measurement, but it's very, very subjective, and their attempts were not successful (IMHO).

I'm a system architect and I receive requests from potential customers. I also have experience with BMC, AppDynamics and New Relic.

You can choose this product if you want to connect Java (or .NET) to database monitoring, because you can see the application’s different activities on the same screen.

This is our solution, which works as a framework in the Foglight interface, and changes the color of the geo-tags depending on the object status.

If there is a customer complaining we can playback and prove what really happened.

FxV is valuable as we can playback the session.

They need to improve the stability of FxM and FxV.

In my experience sometimes the state of FxM/FxV hangs, then I have to manually reboot the appliance.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

I've never had to open a case with support.

It was straightforward to set-up.

We used a vendor team to implement it.

It provided an extra layer of monitoring specifically focused on database infrastructure.

Real time database monitoring and alerting are valuable.

The version compatibility needs work.

Stability was always an issue in large environments.

Often times management servers would become overwhelmed.

I never had to deal with support channels.

We didn't have anything in place previously.

I was not involved in this process.

I recall it being a very expensive solution relative to function and stability.

You need to scale it wisely.

Excellent monitoring capability and business service views

South African skill is scarce

I’m a DBA for a big e-commerce site. Foglight quickly helped us reduce the amount of money lost.

Its module history query increased DBA efficiency. 90% of the time, we couldn’t catch problems in real time. This module helped us with that.

One night at 01:00, we had several customers’ purchase attempts time out, and result in a half-hour outage. Foglight stored the bad queries and we quickly identified the bad code that locked the main database. We corrected it with the developer team.

It provides a history of the activities on our SQL servers.

I would perhaps like to see more SSMS connections.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was straightforward.

The stability we have as a result of using it made up for the cost of the product within a month.

A DBA is needed to use Foglight correctly.

Initially, it meant we no longer needed to spend time manually checking our existing databases/servers which freed us up for other tasks. It also captures information that we wouldn't otherwise have.

Having standard monitoring features and a central repository saves us a lot of time and reduces risk of incidents. It replaces a lot of manual tasks and makes it easier for us to be more pro-active and to prioritise issues across multiple systems. It also keeps a history which we use for post incident reviews and performance monitoring.

In an older version of Foglight, we were not able to get any of our custom agents to work properly so that feature was not as much use as we had initially hoped and haven't tried using since. Being able to incorporate other bespoke monitoring into Foglight would have made the tool even more useful.

I had some issues with the Agents in earlier versions consuming CPU and needing the occasional restart, but we've not had any issues with later versions. The system has been stable now for quite some time.

As our estate grows we can easily incorporate more servers into our existing set up.

I've always had good experience with Dell Support, who we use for other products as well. All of my queries have been answered in the past.

We chose this product over creating our own in-house monitoring procedures. It was recommended to us by several colleagues.

Creating the repository and the management server were quite simple and problem free. Getting the monitoring agents to communicate back to the management server was a bit more tricky but this was mostly down to getting the network set up correctly so not really a direct issue with Foglight itself.

At the time Foglight was still supported by Quest and they sent two representatives to spend a day at our offices to give us a presentation and then aid us through setting up Foglight on our test systems. We then had sufficient knowledge to proceed by ourselves setting up the production equivalent.

In its basic configuration Foglight is relatively easy to install and use and will make supporting a large number of servers/databases much less time consuming. It can be further customised to your own needs.

The extensive monitoring tools embedded in Foglight are a real asset. You can really drill deep into the how and why an alert was created.

As a systems operator, Foglight helped with pinpointing issues with database performance and thus improved our reaction speed. The information we received wasn't just general, it's really extensive.

I recall that the lay-out was rather dull when I used this particular version of Foglight. I'm not sure if this was a user settings or not but a fully grey-white theme with sparse highlights made it sometimes difficult to find my way around. I had some issues with finding acknowledged alerts. Although I think some settings could have been managed by better by the customer, but I read that this was alleviated in future versions.

I've probably used Foglight for about two years. After that, the customer switched to another solution.

From the few talks that I had with the responsible software engineers at our customer I can safely say that deployment happened with relative ease.

As long as the software was in use we did not encounter any technical issues.

As long as the software was in use we did not encounter any technical issues.

I was not in contact with Dell for Foglight technical issues, this was handled by our customer.

Our customer migrated to SCOM for most of their monitoring.

While I did not implement Foglight, I would always advice everyone to just compare all options and pick the one that suits their organization best. Some companies like to analyze any and all alerts to the very core by using a varied amount of tools while others require way simpler monitoring.

The features of the product most valuable to me are the alert system, Performance tuning (PA) and the monitoring capability.

The product has improved the way we respond to database issues as it has made us more proactive. For example: the alerts systems now gives as a global picture of locks, thresholds, etc. for our database systems.

The monitoring capability and performance tuning.

3 years

We had issues with deployment in the beginning until we had an expert guide us through the process.

Stability is not an issue if you have enough resources on your system to handle the load.

So far so good. We have not encountered any issues with scalability. This solution is being used to monitor 20 plus databases.

Customer Service: The level of customer service is good.Technical Support: The level of technical support is good.

We have a separate solution which is core for all of our other systems. Foglight was solely brought in for our databases.

The whole setup process is not complex at all. It helps to be very good technically to understand the architecture.

We did the implementation through a vendor team and they were very skilled and knowledgeable.

The advice I will give to people regarding Foglight is that the technical team who will be using this product will have to be trained well in order for the company to fully benefit from the product.