Foglight for Databases vs SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer comparison

Quest Software and SolarWinds are both solutions in the Database Development and Management category. Quest Software is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2, while SolarWinds is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.7. Quest Software holds a 7.6% mindshare in DDM, compared to SolarWinds’s 9.3% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Quest Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

Foglight for Databases

Read 14 Foglight for Databases reviews

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1,824 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Database Perform...

Read 12 SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer reviews

1,226 Views
1,226 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Foglight for Databases

SolarWinds Database Perform...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 19, 2025

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer and Foglight for Databases are competitors in the field of database management and performance optimization. Those prioritizing budget and support may lean towards SolarWinds, while Foglight's extensive feature set makes it appealing for comprehensive database solutions.

Features: SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer includes SQL query performance tuning, real-time monitoring, and extensive alerting. Foglight for Databases offers advanced diagnostic tools, predictive analytics, and integration with multiple database environments.

Room for Improvement: SolarWinds could enhance its integration support to accommodate more databases and improve real-time analytics features. It might also benefit from offering more advanced diagnostic capabilities. Foglight could streamline its deployment process and enhance user interface simplicity. It may also consider optimizing resource usage for its advanced features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds is known for straightforward deployment and accessible customer assistance, requiring minimal setup time. In contrast, Foglight may involve a more complex setup but compensates with extensive technical support and detailed documentation.

Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer typically offers a budget-friendly pricing model, attracting those seeking cost-effectiveness. Although Foglight for Databases requires a higher upfront cost, its feature-rich tools often deliver significant ROI in database-intensive environments.

To learn more, read our detailed Foglight for Databases vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Foglight for Databases vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

July 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

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

SolarWinds Database Perform...

Ranking in Database Development and Management

4th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Database Development and Management category, the mindshare of Foglight for Databases is 7.6%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is 9.3%, up from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database Development and Management

Featured Reviews

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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Ravi Khanchandani

Founder Director at Techsa Services

Excels in identifying various database performance issues, including long-running queries, wait times, deadlocks, and other performance-related issues.

There's room for improvement on the dashboarding side. Specifically, the health dashboard of the database instances. Some of my customers deal with a large number of monitored database instances. It would be beneficial if they could have a single dashboard for instances, for example, from number one to thirty. This way, I could monitor all these 30 instances and quickly identify any performance issues on any of them. The dashboarding capability definitely needs improvement. In future releases, there should be custom reports and dashboards are crucial. Not everyone needs to see the same page every time. For example, if I'm interested in MYSQL databases, I should have a view that focuses only on MYSQL databases. Customization like this, where users can tailor their dashboards to specific needs, is essential for improving the product.

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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

"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."

"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."

"Its reporting capabilities are immense."

"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."

"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 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."

More Foglight for Databases pros

"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer can help us identify issues we cannot see manually."

"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer helped us locate the performance issues quickly."

"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer's most valuable features include the notification of consuming the SQL queries, collecting data, and notifying about managing space and tables."

"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is anomaly detection. It alerts you when things outside the norm are happening, and the feature that analyzes your indexes informs you if you have wide or overlapping indexes. It also helps identify SQL query bottlenecks, letting you know if something is taking longer than usual, if a query plan has changed, and if you need to update statistics. In terms of usage, it is straightforward to use, learn and understand. The patching process is smooth and explains each feature, including links to external resources for further reading."

"In IT, problems often occur in areas such as applications, web interfaces, or databases. The tool allows users to easily determine the root cause of these issues, whether they stem from the network layer, database layer, or elsewhere."

"What I like most about SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is that it's a powerful solution that lets me advise customers about performance, and it also gives a lot of supporting information."

"The platform solves and prevents delays in receiving answers from databases."

"Monitoring is most valuable, and being able to know that there is an issue or problem and I need to go look is also valuable. So, monitoring and learning are the most important features."

More SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More Foglight for Databases cons

"One area where the tool could improve is by adding support for additional databases. For instance, supporting newer databases like Couchbase or MongoDB would be beneficial."

"The solution should add little details on the server so that an independent team could easily do the implementation."

"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer should include more details on how everything works."

"Technical support for this solution needs to be improved."

"The areas where it currently lags are in reporting and dashboarding. The reports and dashboards are somewhat static, and we cannot create custom dashboards for specific customer needs."

"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer should provide customization options allowing users to add different columns."

"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer should be easy to implement and it should have more facilities to make it better."

"It is capable, but I don't believe it has the right value matrix. It also depends on the budget of the company."

More SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"It could be less expensive."

"SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is a little bit expensive."

"There are no extra costs for maintenance or using the solution's support."

"The pricing is fairly reasonable, and it becomes more cost-effective with larger volumes of instances."

"The pricing of the solution is average."

"I don't remember the exact licensing cost for SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer, but it's within the range of $2,000 to $3,000 a year."

"Customers need to pay for the subscription-based license annually."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

14%

Healthcare Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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.

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

What do you like most about SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer?

In IT, problems often occur in areas such as applications, web interfaces, or databases. The tool allows users to easily determine the root cause of these issues, whether they stem from the network...

See all answers

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer?

One area where the tool could improve is by adding support for additional databases. For instance, supporting newer databases like Couchbase or MongoDB would be beneficial.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer?

We use SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer for performance monitoring, tuning, and troubleshooting performance issues. It's mainly related to performance and the database community. Database a...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 36% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Enterprise Manager vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 8% of the time

SQL Sentry vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 7% of the time

IDERA DB Optimizer vs Foglight for Databases

Compared 5% of the time

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SQL Sentry vs SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Compared 37% of the time

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Compared 13% of the time

Spotlight vs SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Enterprise Manager vs SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Compared 9% of the time

IDERA SQL Admin Toolset vs SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Foglight for Databases

August 2025

Download Foglight for Databases product report

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

July 2025

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer report

Download SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer product report

Also Known As

No data available

Confio, SolarWinds DPA, Ignite8

Overview

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

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is a powerful monitoring service that allows customers to monitor their databases. It offers system metrics such as RAM consumption, IO, network traffic, etc. The service is available for both on-prem and cloud deployments, making it a versatile solution for businesses of all sizes.

The most valuable feature is its ability to monitor and learn from the data it collects, helping identify issues and problems before they become major problems, and saving businesses time and money. The service also provides supporting information for performance advising, which helps optimize database performance.

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

CommitDBA

GSI Commerce, Liquid Digital Media, ProLogis, Indiana University

Buyer's Guide

Foglight for Databases vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

July 2025

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