BMC AMI DevX vs Foglight for Databases comparison

BMC and Quest Software are both solutions in the Database Development and Management category. BMC is ranked #19 with an average rating of 7.7, while Quest Software is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2. BMC holds a 1.3% mindshare in DDM, compared to Quest Software’s 4.4% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of BMC users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Quest Software users who would recommend it.

BMC AMI DevX

Read 19 BMC AMI DevX reviews

4,059 Views
244 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Foglight for Databases

Read 14 Foglight for Databases reviews

1,788 Views
1,770 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

BMC AMI DevX

Foglight for Databases

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 11, 2025

BMC AMI DevX and Foglight for Databases compete in the software solutions category with each offering unique benefits. BMC AMI DevX holds an edge in pricing and support attractiveness, while Foglight stands out in monitoring performance across different environments.

Features: BMC AMI DevX supports mainframe environments with powerful code debugging, file editing, and improved documentation, crucial for mainframe developers. Foglight excels with advanced monitoring capabilities, insightful performance investigations, and management across diverse database types, allowing DBAs to engage in proactive monitoring and real-time diagnostics.

Room for Improvement: BMC AMI DevX would benefit from enhancing its installation process, REXX macro support, and documentation. Foglight could improve alert management and reporting features. Both need better integration with legacy systems, reflecting evolving technology and industry standards.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: BMC AMI DevX and Foglight offer on-premises and cloud deployment options. BMC AMI DevX is praised for its responsive tech support, slightly surpassing Foglight in user satisfaction despite Foglight’s robust deployment options for both private and public clouds.

Pricing and ROI: BMC AMI DevX provides competitive pricing within enterprise agreements, demonstrating cost efficiency with increased productivity and ROI. Foglight, positioned as a premium option, offers substantial value through its monitoring and diagnostic features, justifying its higher cost with enhanced performance insights and comprehensive support. Both show positive ROI, with cost-effectiveness depending on specific organizational needs and budget.

To learn more, read our detailed BMC AMI DevX vs. Foglight for Databases Report (Updated: October 2025).

Buyer's Guide

BMC AMI DevX vs. Foglight for Databases

October 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

BMC AMI DevX

Ranking in Database Development and Management

19th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Software Configuration Management (1st), Debugging (9th), Mainframe Application Development (1st), Test Data Management (7th), Mainframe Testing Tools (1st), Data Masking (8th)

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 November 2025, in the Database Development and Management category, the mindshare of BMC AMI DevX is 1.3%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Foglight for Databases is 4.4%, down from 6.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database Development and Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Foglight for Databases	4.4%
BMC AMI DevX	1.3%
Other	94.3%

Database Development and Management

Featured Reviews

Brian Westerman

Director of R&D at Syzygy Inc.

Helps to make mainframe data management process easier and saves manhours

We plan to replace BMC Compuware File-AID due to its price. Two years back, we paid 11,000 dollars. However, the current price is 27,900 dollars. The price has increased to at least eight times its initial cost. We would need to pay around 60,000 dollars to have all three products together. We also encountered issues during version updates.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product has made our mainframe data management process easier. It has helped us save manhours. The tool's most valuable feature is the ability to edit tape files. Its ability to clone files is beneficial in application development."

"The visual ability to see potential downstream impacts to changes being made assists our developers in understanding the impact associated with their change."

"BMC Data Management improved our data recovery process by simplifying it."

"I like the ability to flow through the source and see what happens to the data as the statements are executed. If there is a fault, it will track the event, and we can then look back to see why it may have caused the fault. You can also reverse engineer your test. You can set it so that you can go backward as well as forward in your test. This is something that I haven't done here at my company. Compuware Xpediter is one of the best debugging tools for mainframe software development. We have currently licensed only the COBOL language for Xpediter, but I know they have other languages, including Assembler, PL/I."

"Once we got the configurations and deployment rolled out, it was very stable. I haven't had any major issues with Eclipse or the Topaz Workbench plugins."

"The smart editor helps because it will code-complete for me. I can see code working a lot faster and I'm able to get things coded in less time."

"From a user perspective, the GUIs make it easier for people to see and interact with files on the mainframe."

"Test data management capabilities are good."

More BMC AMI DevX pros

"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."

"One of the hardest things to do in database management is to evaluate performance deviation across time. The adaptive baseline that Quest is using is by far the most helpful. That doesn't necessarily mean I use it on a daily basis, but it is something that I have not been able to find in any other tool, at the same level."

"We can visualize all the different types of DB servers that we are monitoring in a single pane of glass. It uses a 360-degree overview of the database, for each of those databases that we are monitoring. That includes what kind of resource utilization is happening and what kind of DB parameters are getting monitored, as well as the different types of DB parameters that are being offered for each database type."

"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."

"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."

"The platform is very stable."

"Its reporting capabilities are immense."

More Foglight for Databases pros

Cons

"There are some features that are not well documented, so documentation could use a little help, on things like setting up deployment and which structures in the database correspond to which tables."

"It would be good if the vendors would work together or at least have some collaboration between them, so they would know what would work and what wouldn't work. Right now, the way things are working, they're relying on the customer to make everything work."

"It would be nice to have an audit trail to see what mainframe developers are using what."

"The solution could be improved by being better integrated with the open world. In the next release, I would like to have the ability to work in an open environment whilst remaining integrated with the legacy environment."

"When you're setting up the parameters for how ISPW will work in your shop, there are a lot of questions that have to be answered... BMC Compuware should have more in-depth explanations about what the choices in each question mean. If you pick A, what does that mean has to happen? What does that impact? If you pick B, what does that mean? What does that impact?"

"It often doesn't play well with other plugins in the environment."

"We plan to replace BMC Compuware File-AID due to its price. Two years back, we paid 11,000 dollars. However, the current price is 27,900 dollars. The price has increased to at least eight times its initial cost. We would need to pay around 60,000 dollars to have all three products together. We also encountered issues during version updates."

"It's not as intuitive as it should be. In terms of navigation, there is a large training curve for using it. For a millennial it might be better, if they're used to Eclipse. But coming from a non-Eclipse environment and using Eclipse, though I have experience with Eclipse, it might be cumbersome."

More BMC AMI DevX cons

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

More Foglight for Databases cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price point is great."

"It has saved our developers time and effort when working on documentation, which is now more readable and fluent."

"I like the seat-based licensing much more than MSU-based licensing, and that the cost has been competitive."

"In terms of pricing, there isn't an extra charge for the parts of it we use. It comes with the licenses we purchased for other products, so no complaints there. The licensing is built in with the other products that you purchase from Compuware."

"The only thing I would mention related to the licensing and/or the pricing, is that they have some visualization features in there that are licensed by concurrent users. We're starting to trip up on that. We're looking to probably increase the number of concurrent licenses that we have. But those types of licensing strategies, where they license by concurrent users or the number of seats is confusing for some people. They don't understand why it works sometimes and doesn't work other times."

"In general, Compuware tools are very competitive."

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

"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."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

36%

Insurance Company

12%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Large Enterprise	16

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	10

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Compuware File-AID?

The product has made our mainframe data management process easier. It has helped us save manhours. The tool's most valuable feature is the ability to edit tape files. Its ability to clone files is ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Compuware File-AID?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Compuware File-AID?

We use the solution clone test files.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

Comparisons

Endevor vs BMC AMI DevX

Compared 26% of the time

IBM File Manager vs BMC AMI DevX

Compared 14% of the time

IBM Debug for z/OS vs BMC AMI DevX

Compared 9% of the time

InterTest vs BMC AMI DevX

Compared 8% of the time

Rocket Enterprise Developer (formerly a Micro Focus product) vs BMC AMI DevX

Compared 5% of the time

More BMC AMI DevX Competitors

Spotlight vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 28% of the time

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 19% of the time

Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 12% of the time

Oracle Enterprise Manager vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 9% of the time

SQL Sentry vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 7% of the time

More Foglight for Databases Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

BMC AMI DevX

November 2025

Download BMC AMI DevX product report

Buyer's Guide

Foglight for Databases

November 2025

Download Foglight for Databases product report

Also Known As

File-AID, Data for Db2, Code Debug, Data Studio, Workbench for Eclipse, Code Pipeline

No data available

Overview

BMC AMI DevX is a comprehensive solution enhancing code management and testing efficiency. It offers debugging capabilities within financial applications and integrates data management seamlessly, serving major banking sectors with reliable performance.

AMI DevX is tailored for banking industries, optimizing application debugging in COBOL and enhancing data handling in robust financial systems. It simplifies mainframe data management with real-time insights, improving efficiency through editing and cloning functionalities. The tool's integration with Compuware File-AID for IMS and DB2 ensures streamlined development processes. Challenges include a steep DB2 learning curve and initial setup complexities, with technical support inconsistencies and steep pricing impacting affordability. Despite this, its valuable features significantly support large banking operations.

What features make BMC AMI DevX valuable?

Line-by-Line Code Debugging: Allows precise identification and rectification of issues.
Variable Change & Line Skipping: Flexibility in testing without recompiling.
Database-Independent Testing: No need for loading databases during testing.
Real-Time Data Insights: Enhances decision-making with immediate information.
Data Warehousing & Analytics: Facilitates comprehensive data analysis.
Integration & Formatting: Streamlines development by simplifying data processes.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Improved Efficiency: Streamline data management and editing capabilities.
Robust Debugging: Effective in both online and batch COBOL program debugging.
Enhanced Financial Application Support: Superior handling in grants and loans applications.
Comprehensive Testing: Enables creation of clone test files for thorough testing.

In large banking sectors, BMC AMI DevX is integral for grants and loans-related applications. Its robust nature supports financial systems, offering debugging for COBOL, updating data in Compuware File-AID for IMS, and integrating DB2. Users implement this for exceptional data management and application reliability.

BMC

Foglight for Databases offers comprehensive monitoring with real-time activity screens and adaptive baselines. It provides a 360-degree overview and efficient UI, requiring no custom scripts, aiding in proactive issue identification and resolution before impacting end users.

Foglight for Databases is a robust tool for monitoring across multiple platforms, including SQL and Oracle. It provides features like the "Morning Coffee" dashboard and SQL Performance Investigator, enabling effective workload analysis and historical investigation. Despite some challenges with sluggish performance on large data volumes and excessive non-critical alerts, it remains a preferred choice for its ability to support proactive management and resource planning. Users appreciate its centralized view of extensive database systems, enabling swift detection and resolution of issues in real-time.

What are the key features?

Comprehensive Monitoring: Provides cross-platform real-time monitoring, ensuring effective database management.
Adaptive Baselines: Adjusts to various workloads, enhancing monitoring accuracy.
SQL Performance Investigator: Offers detailed workload analysis without server impact.
Proactive Alerts: Delivers timely notifications, aiding in immediate issue resolution.
Efficient UI: Streamlines user interaction, minimizing the need for custom scripts.

What benefits and ROI should be considered?

Time Saving: Reduces time in root cause analysis, enhancing productivity.
Proactive Management: Detects issues before they affect end users, minimizing downtime.
Resource Planning: Aids in effective allocation planning for enterprise and cloud platforms.

Foglight is extensively implemented in industries managing extensive database systems, handling numerous servers to ensure availability and performance. It assists businesses in resolving blocking and locking deadlocks, crucial for maintaining smooth operations in production and development environments.

Quest Software

Sample Customers

Helvetia, The IMT Group, Hapag-Lloyd, Royal Bank of Canada, Chunghwa Telecom

CommitDBA

Buyer's Guide

BMC AMI DevX vs. Foglight for Databases

October 2025

Free Report: BMC AMI DevX vs. Foglight for Databases

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