CA IDMS vs Quest Foglight for Databases comparison

Broadcom and Quest Software are both solutions in the Database Development and Management category. Broadcom is ranked #28, while Quest Software is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2. Broadcom holds a 1.1% mindshare in DDM, compared to Quest Software’s 8.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Broadcom users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Quest Software users who would recommend it.

CA IDMS

Read 5 CA IDMS reviews

116 Views
92 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 IDMS

Quest Foglight for Databases

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

CA IDMS and Quest Foglight for Databases are competing in the database management and monitoring space. Quest Foglight appears to have the upper hand due to its advanced real-time performance monitoring capabilities and comprehensive solution for database issues.

Features: CA IDMS provides efficient database management, strong integration with legacy systems, and high-level data processing. Quest Foglight for Databases offers real-time performance monitoring, in-depth database diagnostics, and comprehensive alert systems, making it ideal for organizations needing advanced analytics and visualization tools.

Room for Improvement: CA IDMS could improve its modern monitoring capabilities, user interface, and support for newer database trends. Quest Foglight can enhance its UI simplicity, extend support to more diverse database types, and reduce resource usage for performance monitoring tasks by optimizing real-time data gathering.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: CA IDMS caters mainly to large-scale legacy environments with traditional deployment models that often require more resources. Quest Foglight, on the other hand, is designed for modern architectures with a streamlined and flexible deployment process complemented by superior, responsive customer support.

Pricing and ROI: CA IDMS may require a high initial investment, with returns tied to legacy system efficiency. Quest Foglight offers more favorable pricing with faster ROI, as its monitoring tools help reduce downtime and ensure optimal database performance. The initial cost is often offset by long-term savings through enhanced operational efficiency.

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

Buyer's Guide

CA IDMS 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 IDMS

Ranking in Database Development and Management

28th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

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 May 2025, in the Database Development and Management category, the mindshare of CA IDMS is 1.1%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quest Foglight for Databases is 8.3%, 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_user558606

Application Development Manager at Aetna

We get network database performance. It supports our back office.

I don't have anything to add. I've heard about web services. We might be looking at a Java connection or web services in the future. It's serving our purpose right now. We're not looking for anything new. For what we do, it meets all our needs. We have to use DB2 when we need more relational constructs, expanded inquiry and reporting; so it's not perfect in that regards. We use it really for our transaction processing, not as much for reporting. For transaction processing, it's doing the job we need. To go into more in-depth, high-volume reporting, we offload a lot of the data to DB2.

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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

"Technical support is very good. They are very knowledgeable, very quick to respond, and very nice people, too."

"It is a really stable platform. It has been around for many years. We trust it implicitly. "

"The most useful feature is the governance feature, because it can show us and help us to manage user profiles very quickly and using it in assertive way."

"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."

"Its reporting capabilities are immense."

"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 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."

"The platform is very stable."

"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."

"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 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."

More Quest Foglight for Databases pros

Cons

"Right now, it's not easy to start using this solution. You have to take long course and train people. It's not an easy path."

"I would like to see it made simpler to operate and maintain."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

More Quest Foglight for Databases cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Do not hold back on asking questions about the maintenance and continued support of the product."

"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."

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

"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 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

22%

Government

15%

Computer Software Company

10%

University

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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.

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 78% of the time

CA Datacom vs CA IDMS

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SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer vs Quest Foglight for Databases

Compared 30% of the time

Oracle Enterprise Manager vs Quest Foglight for Databases

Compared 9% of the time

SQL Sentry vs Quest Foglight for Databases

Compared 8% of the time

Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials vs Quest Foglight for Databases

Compared 7% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Database Development and Management

April 2025

Download CA IDMS product report

Buyer's Guide

Quest Foglight for Databases

April 2025

Download Quest Foglight for Databases product report

Also Known As

IDMS

No data available

Overview

CA IDMS is a reliable, high-performance, web-enabled Database Management system (DBMS) for IBM z Systems that provides business value for hundreds of enterprises and government organizations. CA IDMS provides high-performance database management and transaction processing performance for existing and new workloads, helping you consolidate business functions on a central data repository, as needed.

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 IDMS vs. Quest Foglight for Databases

April 2025

Free Report: CA IDMS vs. Quest Foglight for Databases

Find out what your peers are saying about CA IDMS vs. Quest Foglight for Databases and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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