Quest Foglight for Databases Reviews

We monitor quite a few database servers. The actual number jumps up and down on a regular basis, but on average we're doing 120 servers at a time. It gives us one pane of glass to be able to see which ones are having actual issues and which ones are just going along.

When we do have issues, for example, that our financial software starts having slowness, we can use the Performance Investigator module and dig into where it's actually slowing down. It allows us to do the troubleshooting and resolution at least 10 times faster and get the users back to work. I and one other senior DBA on the team have built queries that we can dig in with, but going through all the results is huge and time-consuming. This solution helps us narrow in on the problem a lot faster.

Also, our AppDev team used to love to develop on production servers. By being able to show them the metrics of how they were actually affecting the performance, we were able to get them to move to a development server and not do any development work while they're on the production server. In the four-and-a-half years that we've been using it, that change has probably saved us four years' worth of time.

The most valuable feature is that it's one pane of glass and enables us to see everything at once.

The other senior DBA spends a good part of his day in it and he's focusing on indexes right now. The PI module allows him to identify which new indexes or modified indexes are going to make the biggest impact.

I had never used Foglight before I got to this company, because I didn't have the time. I had other responsibilities besides just DBA work so I couldn't focus on what Foglight could give me. Having said that, there's still a lot of "noise." I get a lot of alerts that, while important, are not critical. Then I have to dig in and figure out how to turn alerts off, but not the logging. I want to be able to go back, once we get the other big issues out of the way, and start fine-tuning some of those other areas, but I don't necessarily want to receive an email for all of them. Over this past weekend I had 400 emails from Foglight. That's a lot. And at least 395 of them were white noise.

They need to make an interface where it's easier to turn the alerts off but not turn the alarm off. The other senior DBA on staff got frustrated with the alerts, so he just went and turned the alarm completely off. I said to him that while it won't alert us anymore, we'll also lose visibility into that aspect. It's something that we do want to be able to see at some point, just not right now.

I have been Quest Foglight for Databases for about four-and-a-half years.

I like the stability. The only outages we've had were related to updates. We had a one-day outage when we upgraded and that was due to issues that were not documented in the update process. Otherwise, the product itself hasn't crashed and the virtual machines haven't crashed.

We notified the vendor of the undocumented issues and they were really quick to get on the phone and tell us, "Okay, this is a step we didn't put in the documentation, but we need you to do the following."

It's definitely scalable. 

Now that they've moved to the SQL Server side for a SQL PI, the Performance Investigator, it's a little limiting. We've had to increase the drive sizes to capture that Performance Investigator information, but I prefer that it's in a SQL database because it's easier to report that way. Also, previously they were using a product called Infobright which stored everything on the C drive. There were a couple of times where that drive would fill up and once the C drive fills up, you can't do anything with it. I was glad that they moved to SQL. We put it on its own instance so it has its own set of drives and, more importantly, it's not on the C drive. And if we need to, we can expand it.

We'd like to increase usage of the solution if we can. I'm trying to get the application development team to use it more extensively. We also have a new warehouse that opened up and I'm trying to get the person who's supporting the application there to use it. I expect that our usage will expand.

The technical support is really great. I've never had an issue that they weren't quick to jump on and get resolved rather quickly. 

The sales support is very good. Once they see a request come in, they'll help to escalate it, if necessary. Overall, I've had a lot of really good experiences with their tech support. I'm very pleased with that.

I was the only one involved in the initial setup in our company. There was a little complexity to it, but overall it was very straightforward. We didn't have any real issues getting it set up and running. 

You've got to let it run for a while before you determine what is white noise and what are actionable items. Then you have to go back in and say, "This is not something to alert on, but it is something that I still want to log." Sometimes that white noise does come in handy when you're looking at troubleshooting a long-running issue.

From start to finish, the deployment took a week.

First off, I had to get all the servers built and we did virtuals. But I had to get a tie-in with our server team to get those set up and running. The requirements, themselves, were pretty straightforward. I could present to the server team exactly what we needed and how we needed to set it up. Getting the basic infrastructure in place was what took the most time. Once we actually started the install of Foglight, it was pretty simple.

I haven't been able to pin down an exact ROI, but I can easily say that it has helped with expenses that would be related to certain issues.

I can give you one really good example. We've got 32 stores that are scattered all around the country. Foglight was able to identify that none of these were being backed up. We got an alert: "Hey, we don't have a backup for these servers." That got us to start backing up those servers. If one of those servers crashed the process was to get a new server put onsite. They would have to start from scratch, install SQL, create a blank database, and then have to spend 24 to 48 hours getting it caught up with information that the system already had, back here. In the process, they lost two days of sales but they also lost the data that was on that server.

We got a call one day that one of the servers crashed. We had a server sitting in the shop and rushed it out to them in an hour. They said, "Okay, we did a restore of the database," and within 20 minutes they were ready to open the shop. They called the store manager and said, " Okay, you're up and running, ready to open the doors again." And she said, "I just sent everybody home. I thought we were going to be out for two days."

We were able to resolve the issue because we were aware of it. That's what I like about Foglight. It does help us to be aware of potential issues and even get ahead of them.

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

I have worked with the sales staff at Quest by talking to other potential customers, and have said, "If you don't have the time to focus on the issues that it can present to you, if you've got to split your time between database administration and system administration or helpdesk, then maybe Foglight is too much for you."

There are other modules that you can add in for additional cost. For example, you can do network monitoring tools and I believe there's a physical Windows Server monitoring tool. We don't use those because our server team and network teams both have tools that they like better.

In other jobs, I've used other products. I've used the other product from Quest called Spotlight. I've used Idera and Redgate monitoring tools. They're great if you only have the time to look at the general performance, whereas Foglight gives you enough detail to actually resolve a SQL-related issue.

Foglight is a really good solution for database monitoring. With that being said, it gives you the opportunity to get so much information that it's overload, if you don't have the time to dig into it.

If you've got the time for it, the time to focus on databases in general, then Foglight is definitely worth the expense because of the information that it can provide for you.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that it's worth it. It enables you to pin down troubleshooting within 30 minutes to an hour, whereas before, you'd be pouring over reports or data from queries for days. That's huge. The CIO has told me that since we've started using Foglight, we've actually gotten ahead of some of these issues and we're actually being proactive instead of reactive.

We're in it all day, every day. I and at least two other DBAs are in it regularly, as well as some AppDev team members that we're trying to get to use it. We've got other database wannabes that are using it and our systems admins use it as well. Overall, there are 10 to 15 users. In the IT department, it is used pretty extensively.

There aren't a lot of tools that I've tried to integrate it with. I'm in the process, when I have the time, of integrating it with ServiceNow.

We are using Foglight to monitor both SQL Server and Oracle Databases across the enterprise and across multiple directory domains.

Our Foglight installation is on-premises and on virtual servers.

In general, it helps us become more proactive rather than reactive. DBAs can go in and look at the different alarms and tweak thresholds. Obviously, if we wanted to be proactive, we would want to catch some of these issues while they are still in the warning or critical stage before they become fatal alarms. So, the biggest benefit to the organization is the fact that we can proactively monitor databases and prevent downtime. For example, this could be resource contention, where we could look at memory, CPU, or storage. If it is starting to creep up and show yellow or orange on the dashboard that means the DBA needs to either troubleshoot what could be grabbing all those resources or plan to extend some resources, before they run out.

When we use the solution for monitoring databases, it enables us to drill down and see what is causing an issue, e.g., if something doesn’t look right, especially if the DBA is seeing a pattern. If it is something that recurs a couple of times, then we would definitely leverage Foglight as well to drill down and take a look at activities. We also have the Performance Investigator in the environment, which I find to be handy because you can drill down into actual connections and look up which users are connected, which workstations are connected, and which servers are connected, then try to drill down on the problematic session/query. Sometimes, if we are troubleshooting performance, then we will need to drill down into the end user or the actual client machine where the connection is coming from. We have the ability to go back and adjust the timeline to drill down to a specific time window. That is where the Performance Investigator does a great job. This has saved us lots of time with root cause analysis. It could save anywhere from hours to days. If you are trying to track things down without these types of tools, then it becomes really challenging.

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.

Right now, we leverage the infrastructure cartridges, which come with Foglight for Oracle and SQL, for OS monitoring. This is very important because we do have to monitor the storage CPU, memory, and network.

The main reason why we picked Foglight: We can have a single pane of glass for both SQL and Oracle across our entire environment, which has been very useful to us. The main use cases are for monitoring health of our databases and being able to assist with performance troubleshooting.

Foglight provides real-time activity screens. Typically, we go to the real-time dashboard when we are troubleshooting issues. If there is something going on, then a DBA needs to drill down more and try to pinpoint the activity currently going on that might be causing the issue.

We use the solution to display the most intensive database queries. This ties in with our performance troubleshooting. This is usually one of the first things we go and check if we are troubleshooting performance. So, if an end user calls us complaining that the database is slow, this is typically where we start.

We use Foglight's ability to proactively alert us to long-running queries. For example, something was causing us grief with one of our integration pieces. So, we needed a way to detect long-running queries.

The data model needs improvement when it comes to creating custom reports. That is an area where it needs a bit of improvement. Foglight gathers a lot of information around our databases as part of its monitoring. While I know all this information is in there, trying to pull the metric we want out for custom reports is sometimes hard to find. One nice thing about Foglight is that you can create custom dashboards, which you can easily convert to reports. We would be doing a lot more of that if it weren't for the challenging data model.

We have been using it for over three years. It will be four years in June.

It is stable. Over a span of four years, we have done cartridge updates and Foglight management-ware updates. We haven't encountered any major issues at all.

To maintain it, we just have one primary and one backup DBA.

We purchased the Auto Maintenance Cartridge, which was a good call because it helped alleviate a lot of the maintenance work. Prior to that, it did take the DBAs a bit of time to maintain it. However, with the Auto Maintenance Cartridge, it automated some of these tasks. This probably saves the DBAs a couple of hours a week.

Scalability is very good. You just need to make sure that your Foglight infrastructure is sized appropriately. That is where Quest Professional Services came in and gave us advice on what to watch out for, in terms of how many agents each management server can support.

One of the nice things with Foglight is that we were able to grant access outside of the DBA team, like our operations support team. For example, if they are troubleshooting an application issue, then they could quickly go into Foglight and check whether the database is up or down on the dashboard without having to call the DBAs. From that perspective, it has offloaded some of the calls to the DBAs.

SQL and Oracle are the two database platforms that we are supporting internally. From that perspective, we will continue leveraging Foglight. Even when we do start moving databases to the public cloud, it will be our first choice. We would try to evaluate and do a PoC of monitoring the cloud database with Foglight. As long as everything looks good, I don't see us deviating from the use of Foglight.

About a year or so in, we engaged professional services to integrate our Foglight with ServiceNow. So, we have automated incident ticket creation now with Foglight.

Quest Premier Support has been great. They are probably one of the best ones when compared to other vendors. They are very responsive. We have a great technical account manager as well. Anytime we have to log a support call, it gets dealt with and resolved very quickly.

Quest Premier Support has added value to our overall investment. Support definitely plays a role in the effectiveness of the product. When we do upgrades of our Foglight systems, or if we encounter issues, their support really becomes important. They resolve the issues quickly to minimize any gaps in our monitoring.

Before Foglight, we really didn't have any type of "enterprise database monitoring tool". What the DBAs had before was a bunch of scripts, which wasn't really a monitoring tool. It was just a bunch of scripts that ran, then emailed the DBAs the issues. On the Oracle side, we didn't have diagnostic and tuning packs at all before. So, it was really a big gap. Foglight was way more cost-effective.

The installation was straightforward; it wasn't too difficult. Understanding the thresholds tends to take a bit more work. The DBAs need to tweak the threshold when they set things up, so they don't get inundated with alarms. However, with any type of monitoring tool, you need to do that anyway.

The deployment took a couple of months. We had provisioned a bunch of virtual servers for this implementation, and we needed to monitor multiple directory domains.

When we did the initial deployment, we engaged Quest Professional Services to help us size out what we would need and architect the Foglight solution. We had to make sure we had the Foglight agents configured properly across the enterprise. However, once it was all set up and configured, the registering of databases for day-to-day use was all straightforward.

We only had two DBAs involved in the setup, one was more SQL-focused and the other was more Oracle-focused.

We have seen ROI. It was a good investment because now we have insight into the health and performance of our databases. Previously, there were a lot of unknowns and risks. Now, we can be proactive with our database health. In addition to that, we were able to get a lot more insights into how our databases are being used. We have also leveraged some of the custom dashboarding. We did a custom dashboard to monitor one of our data synchronization screens. This was handy because we just published that as part of the Foglight, as an additional dashboard.

We are currently licensed for Foglight for Oracle and SQL Server, along with LiteSpeed, which is their backup solution for SQL Server.

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.

We did evaluate other options. It was very limited, probably about three or four vendors. As far as cross database platform monitoring tools goes, Foglight stood out. What we noticed with some of the other products is that they were either good at monitoring one platform only or didn’t go deep into database monitoring/troubleshooting. That was one differentiator. The other differentiator was the cost to be able to monitor enterprise-wide.

Foglight allows you to go in, modify, or create custom rules. As a user of Foglight, when you create rules and dashboards, it is important to document them. If you are not careful about coming up with proper naming standards and documentation for anything custom that you create on top of what comes out-of-the-box, then when you have staff turnover over time and you are trying to go back and understand how things were configured, it becomes challenging.

Each environment is different. Different companies have different use cases. Understand your requirements and your use case. That is the key prior to jumping into implementing any product.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of 10.

Primarily, we use it to monitor about 1,500 databases for availability and for database space, among other metrics.

It enables us to monitor multiple database platforms. We have MS SQL, Oracle, Db2, and Sybase. We also have Vertica and other platforms for which we use a custom monitoring solution from Foglight. That ability has been very helpful because the DBAs don't have to go to different vendors to get the information. It's all assembled in one place and it buys them time and makes it simple to find out what's going on with the databases.

Using it, we're also able to monitor the OS, hybrid clouds, and hardware across different platforms. For the most part, it would just be the Linux and Windows platforms, because those are the main two that we use. This ability is handy because of the resulting simplicity for the DBAs.

We have four flavors of databases and we're able to monitor them all using a single pane. That comes in handy to the DBAs.

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.

Foglight does a lot out-of-the-box, but there are times when you need something that it doesn't come with; a custom solution. 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. 

But having said that, the help is there if we need it. It's just that it probably costs some money to do that.

I have been using Quest Foglight For Databases for about five and a half years. I'm not a DBA. I just stand up the platform and make sure it is available for use by our DBAs.

I've had problems with its stability in the past, but they were because the platform was not tuned correctly. One thing that I would suggest is that they should put that information out there: How to tune the platform and make sure that it's running at its optimum capacity. I had problems with it for a long time, and it took a while before we could get it running with optimum performance. If I had known how to do it ahead of time, we could have saved some time.

The scalability is very good for us. The one thing that we've been told is that when you have more than 800 databases, you have to spawn another management station. I hope that can be expanded for a single FMS (Foglight Management Server). The number of databases that one FMS can monitor in an optimum way should be more than 800. We haven't had that problem yet, but we are fast approaching that number and it's a concern.

We've never used the SQL-PI component of it but we plan to use it, and that will make it that much more beneficial. It will provide analyses of the database processes. It will be beneficial for our SQL queries and for how to approach the configuration of indices.

Their technical support is a nine out of 10. There is always room for improvement. There are times when a question is asked and it takes a little longer than expected to get a response back. It may be that they are juggling the needs of other customers, and I understand that. But that would be the only complaint.

We have their Premier Support. One of the advantages is that we're able to have 'round-the-clock support. There are times when you have a problem and you can't wait until the next day or, if it's a Friday, until Monday. When we need help right away, that has been very helpful.

I'm not aware of any previous solution. When I joined the company, Foglight was in use already.

The process is very straightforward. It's more like plug-and-play and very easy. I have rarely had to call support to help with any installation.

We normally have to do the installation in a non-cloud environment and test it out. If there are any problems we encounter with any of the rules, we iron them out with support. Once things are satisfactory and we're confident, we'll push it into production.

In our environment it takes a long time to deploy, but that's not something to do with the product. It's a result of the resources we have and the fact that we have a lot of hoops to go through to get things validated internally. But none of that has anything to do with the Quest product.

We use the help of a consultant from Quest to deploy. They are always available, but they have to work with our bottlenecks, internally. I appreciate that they are very flexible in working with us.

It's a great product. It's probably one of the best in this class and people should not hesitate getting on board with the product. I have found it's very useful for my DBAs.

There are certain situations where you actually need professional services, rather than going in there and getting yourself mired up in something that you can't fix yourself. You should really consider the use of professional services before you get involved in problems that you can't fix yourself.

We use it for monitoring SQL databases, specifically to assess database contention. Additionally, we utilize it for real-time monitoring before deploying changes to production environments.

It provides real-time activity data. When people are saying that things are slow and not moving, we log in, identify the query that is causing the slowdowns, and address the query. It helps us determine what is causing slowdowns and address them.

We were able to see its benefits immediately. We got it to know what is going on in the database. We could very quickly identify the issue.

It enables us to monitor multiple databases. We are currently monitoring two SQL databases. One is our production server, and the other one is our test server. Before putting things in production, we test them in the test environment to ensure that there are no slowdowns with any new implementations. I know it is capable of monitoring many different types of databases, but we just use it for two SQL Servers.

It is good to quickly diagnose and resolve emerging issues. That is why we got it. It enables us to drill down and see what is causing the issue if something does not look right.

I find the SQL statements and activity highlights helpful. We look at them and see what is happening on a database. The graph and resource consumption have helped a few times. We were able to determine a network problem. Because we looked at it every day and saw this network rate increasing, we knew something was going on in the network. We could then investigate. That helped a couple of times.

What I really like is the SQL PI feature, which allows us to drill down into queries and identify what is causing contention in the database. Using the SQL PI feature, I am able to drill down into the queries, see what is blocking, and try to improve it.

It would be helpful to have more communication about new features. The concept of intensive database queries sounds beneficial, but I am not aware of how to access this feature. 

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. That will be handy so that we do not have to wait till it stops working and then clean up the transaction logs. I know we can set up some backups for the transaction logs. It schedules some backups on the transaction log table but sometimes, the backups might not run. It would be handy if there was some indicator saying that the transaction logs are getting full.

I do not like the OS monitoring part of it much. It does not tell me much. It has a nice graphical interface showing the system, the CPU, the files, and some real-time things going on there, but all that is not that useful. The most useful part for me is SQL PI. There are advisories, but most of the time, I ignore them. I look at them only when there is a major problem, and even then, they do not specifically tell me what the issue might be. It just gives an overview. It is not detailed.

I have been using this solution for more than five years.

It is generally stable. However, if transaction logs get full without proper cleanup, it can affect performance.

Previously, when I was using the embedded SQL, there was some lagging. There were some performance issues. That was one of the reasons for moving away from that and going to the SQL Server instance. The transition to SQL Server improved stability from the previous embedded SQL setup. The only issue is when the transaction logs are full.

The support is okay. I would rate them a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I have not used anything to this extent. I have done a few things in SQL Management Studio.

I like the Quest Foglight solution because it is easy and quick. We can quickly see what is going on at a glance. It also has real-time monitoring. With most tools, if there is something going on in a database, you only get a snapshot of time. It is not tracking the history, and the history is the big thing.

It is fully on-premises. We only use it for two servers, and we prefer it to be on-premises. Most of our servers are on-premises.

The deployment was not that difficult. The first version I had was the embedded SQL Server. For version 7.1, I had a dedicated SQL server. Their team helped with that, and it was fine. It was not too difficult. 

It did not take that long. There is not much to do here. Once we have the instance up, we just set up the agent on the databases we want to monitor.

The deployment was done by me with the assistance of Foglight support.

I would rate Quest Foglight for Databases a six out of ten. The product is good, but communication on updates and new features should be improved. We do not always know what is going on with the product.

We use the solution for SQL Server and auction. We have a couple of customers using it for the other case. Other customers are also extending the infrastructure monitoring from the virtualization and the storage.

A feature called Workload Analysis is an important feature. We always offer to our customers which is better than a database. It has a heterogeneous environment. We can monitor from the same console with different database platforms. It is very useful for the DDS responsible for more than one database. Compared to other tools with database vendors, it's more inexpensive. Also, the price is a major factor for us to position to our customers.

Some customers have issues with the way the data gets read and accumulated. They are expecting a different way of data monitoring. After explanation, they understand what exactly they are doing. Quest Foglight primarily focuses on database monitoring. Some customers question its capabilities for application performance monitoring, specifically for Java applications and duplicate detection. End-to-end user experience monitoring was once available but is also currently absent. Foglight provides deep insights for DBAs and infrastructure teams but lacks dedicated application capabilities and user experience monitoring. Foglight must be combined with other specialized tools for comprehensive end-to-end monitoring encompassing applications, networks, databases, operating systems, and infrastructure.

I have been using Quest Foglight for Databases as a system integrator for 15-16 years. We are currently using V7.1 of the solution.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

We have nine customers using this solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

Customer service is responsive, but it has not been so responsive for the last two years. The resources dealing with tickets are taking too much time to respond. We have to wait a week to get an answer or a response. When they respond, they provide the right response. We have lost opportunities during the POC because of the slightly delayed response.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward. We have the expertise to run standard installations with high availability. It depends on the customer and the setup complexity of the environment. The monitoring part can go up and running in one day. Setup may take a week, but we have a customer where we started at 10 AM and ended at 02 PM. It was running and monitoring around 15 equal server database instances in four hours.

Three people are required for the deployment, including one for the database and two for the infrastructure.

The licensing model is straightforward. From day one, we know about the charges and costs involved in a project.

I rate the product’s pricing a five out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I used it when working for a client, in a situation where you takeover management of the systems.

Maintenance was not done properly for over two years before I came in. The solution crashed over the next year, then we migrated the client to another monitoring platform.

• Baselines
• Advisers
• Reoccurring events 
• Its reporting capabilities are immense.
• The deployment is good to work with.
• History capabilities

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

Advise is to size the DB server behind Foglight correctly (which means very big)

No

Yes see other pieces I wrote regarding correctly size the backend DB Server for Foglight

Use to have very basic monitoring like PRTG, N-Able, Zabbix

No setup is awesome complicated (at least the old versions I used to work with)

in house

Have no idea

Red Gate would be the winner!

Red Gate SQLMONITOR

IDERA Diagnostig Manager

It will not fix nothing, you still have to be on expert level