IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs Quest Foglight for Databases comparison

IDERA and Quest Software are both solutions in the Database Development and Management category. IDERA is ranked #13 with an average rating of 7.0, while Quest Software is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2. IDERA holds a 4.2% mindshare in DDM, compared to Quest Software’s 8.0% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of IDERA users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Quest Software users who would recommend it.

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manage...

Read 9 IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server reviews

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382 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Quest Foglight for Databases

Read 14 Quest Foglight for Databases reviews

1,947 Views
722 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manage...

Quest Foglight for Databases

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 23, 2025

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server and Quest Foglight for Databases are two strong contenders in the database performance monitoring market. IDERA is noted for its competitive pricing and strong support, while Quest Foglight is recognized for its comprehensive feature set, making it a worthy investment for in-depth analytics.

Features: IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server excels with user-friendly monitoring and alerting, customizable reporting, and the ability to identify bottlenecks and slow queries. Quest Foglight for Databases stands out with advanced SQL optimization and cross-platform support, including Oracle and MySQL, as well as its robust real-time activity tracking and change tracking capabilities.

Room for Improvement: IDERA could enhance its analytics capabilities and expand its support for various database platforms. It may also benefit from more in-depth real-time diagnostics. Quest Foglight can improve by simplifying its complex setup process and enhancing the user interface for greater ease of use. Expanding its integration with newer database technologies could also be beneficial.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager offers straightforward installation and both local and remote deployment options, along with responsive, personalized support. Quest Foglight, while requiring a more complex setup, provides thorough documentation and scalable architecture. Both offer solid customer support, but IDERA's streamlined deployment provides an edge in convenience.

Pricing and ROI: IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager is attractive for budget-conscious buyers with its lower initial setup cost and quick ROI from improved performance monitoring. Quest Foglight demands a higher upfront investment but promises significant ROI for those needing its advanced capabilities, positioning it as a long-term strategic choice.

To learn more, read our detailed IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs. Quest Foglight for Databases Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs. Quest Foglight for Databases

June 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

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manage...

Ranking in Database Development and Management

13th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Event Monitoring (11th)

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 June 2025, in the Database Development and Management category, the mindshare of IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server is 4.2%, up from 3.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quest Foglight for Databases is 8.0%, up from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database Development and Management

Featured Reviews

reviewer2317098

Assistant at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Offers effective monitoring of resources but lacks the ability to connect to an AWS instance and write custom queries.

We use it mainly for monitoring, including CPU, memory, and disk space, and for troubleshooting purposes We've set up alerts to notify us when performance deviates from the baseline we've configured for each resource. So, whenever that happens, we get an alert and can investigate immediately. So,…

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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

"Monitors and alerts on our mission critical instances in real-time on a 24/7 basis."

"The most valuable features are disk space projections for planning, and also the Snapshotting ability, to look back in time, to see what was going on the server at a particular time. It's basically the output of an sp_who2."

"We're able to diagnose issues prior to their actually becoming issues. Without the alerting, we wouldn't have a clue as to what was going to happen. With the alerting, it gives us a heads-up that a specific threshold has been met, and we need to take specific action."

"SQL DM made troubleshooting much easier and allowed multiple people to look into an issue with confidence."

"The best part of SQL DM is the ability to customize alerts and counters. This allows our team to find an issue then alert on the issue at a granular level."

"Memory and CPU utilization features are good."

"The ability to go back and look at historical data is the most valuable feature."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We went from basically 30% coverage of our production environment to 100% coverage."

"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."

"Its reporting capabilities are immense."

More Quest Foglight for Databases pros

Cons

"They can improve checking the status of the CPU, memory, and IO utilization from each task."

"It would helpful if SQL DM could mark when changes are made within the program."

"I'm going to do an upgrade which may resolve my issues, but one area for improvement is its ability to handle the amount of data that we collect with it. We're likely one of the largest installations, with over 300 servers being collected with this product, and sometimes there are gaps. That would really be my only concern, in terms of how the data is collected and stored, for consistency."

"One thing I'd like to see is the ability to view the execution plan and have the system automatically recommend potential query optimizations, especially at the query level."

"We don't find that it helps us with performance monitoring and diagnostics. We find that SentryOne does that better. Also, in terms of alerts, we had to customize them dramatically so that we didn't get alerted on every little thing."

"The initial setup gives too many user rights to the server, so you have to put a user that is part administrator's group - that's the preferred way - on each server, which is kind of a risk. You want to do least privilege and you're not doing that."

"I would absolutely love to create customized dashboards but, unfortunately, they don't provide me the information that I need to create the report. The report I need is the detail or the transaction detail that's happening on those Snapshots. I'd like to be able to go back through time and search for things. I don't have that functionality, which is very disappointing. That's pretty bad and frustrating because I could query it and find out so much information about what's hitting my environment and when, but instead, they want control over it and to not give me that information. So it's encrypted. I can't pull it out and that is really bothersome."

"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."

"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 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."

"It would be amazing if they could enable the 'Performance Investigator' functionality across all database platforms."

"Foglight does have a component that allows you to look at things in real time, but it's not as friendly or as efficient in terms of responsiveness as Quest Spotlight is. Foglight might be lacking in this department."

"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."

"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."

"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 Quest Foglight for Databases cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is reasonable, it's comparable with the competitors."

"We were upgraded to Premium Support without their actually asking us, when we were quoted. Then I asked for Standard Support and that they had to re-quote us that. But they don't do that by default. They upcharge you by default, which I didn't think was very nice, without even asking."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server?

The ability to go back and look at historical data is the most valuable feature.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server?

One thing I'd like to see is the ability to view the execution plan and have the system automatically recommend potential query optimizations, especially at the query level. In future releases, I w...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server?

We use it mainly for monitoring, including CPU, memory, and disk space, and for troubleshooting purposes.

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

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

Compared 34% of the time

Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials vs IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server

Compared 25% of the time

SCOM vs IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server

Compared 15% of the time

SQL Sentry vs IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server

Compared 14% of the time

Quest Spotlight vs IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server

Compared 12% of the time

More IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server Competitors

Quest Spotlight vs Quest Foglight for Databases

Compared 36% of the time

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer vs Quest Foglight for Databases

Compared 28% of the time

Oracle Enterprise Manager vs Quest Foglight for Databases

Compared 8% of the time

Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials vs Quest Foglight for Databases

Compared 7% of the time

SQL Sentry vs Quest Foglight for Databases

Compared 7% of the time

More Quest Foglight for Databases Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server

June 2025

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server report

Download IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server product report

Buyer's Guide

Quest Foglight for Databases

May 2025

Download Quest Foglight for Databases product report

Also Known As

IDERA SQL DM, IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager

No data available

Overview

SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server helps database administrators to find and fix SQL Server performance problems in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Unlike its competition, it provides effective scalability, advanced SQL query analysis and optimization, prescriptive analysis with corrective SQL scripts, powerful automated alert responses, broad PowerShell integration, complete customization, and extensive support for current and legacy SQL Server and Windows.

IDERA

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

Padnos, University of Notre Dame, D4, Infeon Technologies, Chevron, LC Waikiki, Sisters of Saint Francis Health Services, Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, CVE, Colorado State University, St. Charles, Chaucer PLC, 1-800-Flowers, Ancoris, Money Management, National Opinion Research Center, California Department of Health, Plexus; Aviva, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, CBS, Comcast, Google, Merck, Regions Financial, Schneider Electric, Tata Consultancy Services, Verizon Communications, Zurich Financial Services

CommitDBA

Buyer's Guide

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs. Quest Foglight for Databases

June 2025

Free Report: IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server vs. Quest Foglight for Databases

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