Quest Foglight for Databases Reviews

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.

We use it as a monitoring tool, which is what it's designed for. And we generally only scratch the surface of it. We use it for checking blocking and locking deadlocks, server activity, database activity, running baselines, et cetera. We don't constantly look at it; we only look at it if we've noticed a problem. It could be something that might be brought to our attention where a particular database might not be running as fast as it should. The first thing we jump into is fog Foglight to see if anything jumps out at us.

We have it running locally inside our server room and have three instances of it. Two of them are current, one of them is going to get updated next week.

One of the benefits we see from it is the fact that it already has an answer for us without us really having to ask around. I jump right to that baseline chart and I can show everybody that, between this time and that time, the databases were running as they should be. That way, we know we have to look at something outside of the database as being the issue.

Foglight definitely saves us time when it comes to root cause analysis. We have one senior DBA who will also run some code within SQL Server to double-check a few things, but for the most part he will jump right into Foglight and use that to try to pinpoint where the problem is. He will then take any code he finds in there and throw it into SQL Server to decipher things there.

One of the features that we find most valuable is the logging that it does, because it's very lightweight logging, and that is something we were looking for. We were looking for a software package that won't impact our servers while it monitors them. We capture the SQL statements that are going through the database, the users that are hitting it, and potentially any issues that might be coming up with those users using a particular line of code. It does capture the code that it's running and we might be able to take that and say, "Okay, this code is not efficient enough." We might need to rewrite it before we can put it back into production.

The real-time activity screens are also helpful. The first thing I look at is the baseline. That is my automatic go-to. If somebody is complaining that a database is running slowly, I'll present them with a screenshot of the chart showing that the database is running what I call "baseline normal," meaning it's within our minimum/maximum range of how the database should be running at that point in time during the day. That way, 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 other DBAs who uses the software generally looks at the locking and deadlocks and at any code that jumps out at him that might not be running as efficiently as it should.

The reporting is very confusing. It's not very intuitive. I've used it on occasion, but I've really struggled with getting the reporting to work correctly for me. It's too cumbersome and too busy. I don't like using this expression, but they should dumb it down a little bit because it can be very confusing without proper training.

I've also had a lot of people ask me about customizing some dashboards and I've worked on that on occasion, but again, that's more confusing than it is helpful, although I do have a couple I use myself. I had planned on having some classroom training on this aspect, before all the COVID stuff started. We'll probably end up doing that but, of course, we will have to do it via video conference. But customizing the dashboards is something that could be simplified a little bit. 

The alarms could also be a little bit less confusing. You would expect maybe two or three options in a dropdown but there are about 20 options. They give you a lot of information that is not pertinent to what I'm looking for.

If they can improve the reporting, custom dashboards, and the interface, this product would be an absolute solid 10.

We have been using Quest Foglight for Databases since November of 2016.

It's up about 99 percent of the time.

Generally, if it ever goes down, it's because of something that has happened on our side and nothing that Foglight created or caused. I'm very proud to say that if it goes down, it is rarely due to Foglight.

About two or three years ago, we did have an issue where the Foglight service was stopping by itself. I got a hold of tech support and they determined what the problem was. It was a setting somewhere and they were able to rectify that by making some changes to it. We haven't had that issue since.

If we were to venture outside of SQL Server and go to Oracle or any of the other products that Foglight supports, we would probably buy the cartridges that would interface with Foglight to run those as well. It's very scalable. We're very glad that we've already got our foot in the door with Quest and with Foglight, because we're familiar with it. We don't want to have to start over with somebody else.

It's used by our whole database team—that's 10 of us—but generally only three or four of us look at it. The main interface is good, but once you start drilling down, it can be very intimidating. We have about 300 developers, managers, and directors who all have access to it. Out of them, only about 25 percent of them use it. It can be a rather intimidating interface. It's not as user-friendly as it could be.

If I run into a question, I can email my liaison and she can usually get an answer to me within a couple of hours and, if not, by the end of the day. One of the things that stands out with their Premier Support is their speed, how fast they will get back to me on things.

I can't say enough good things about their tech support. They are always on top of things and that's why, every year when it comes up to renew it, it has never been a question. As soon as I have an issue, I put in a ticket number and, within 30 to 45 minutes if not less, I have a reply. And that is even for a low-priority issue.

They stay on top of everything. They are really good about making sure things are fixed. And even if something carries over to the next day or the next week, because I haven't had time to get it to it, they will email me every couple of days and ask, "How's everything going? Is the problem still there? Is there anything we can do to help?" They stay on top of absolutely everything.

The Premier Support has definitely been an influence in purchasing licenses from Quest. We have 147 licenses for Foglight and at this point we're only using about 112. But every year, when it comes time to renew those, the question is never, "Should we reduce the cost of our licenses?" because we will add more servers to this. The Premier Support drives that fact. We did have an issue where one of the servers was down and it wasn't because of Foglight. The server was just down. My directors said, "We need to get this thing back up. We need Foglight to help us determine what other problems are going on." I mentioned it to my liaison at Quest and she said, "I've got somebody ready to help you. If you need any help at all, they'll be happy to remote in and give you a hand."

We were an IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager company for a number of years and everybody loved it because the interface was not scary, it wasn't intimidating. But the problem with IDERA was that they didn't have a web solution at the time. That's why we looked at Foglight. It already had a web solution and that's what we wanted.

When we decided to go with Foglight, a lot of people stopped using the diagnostics part because it was very intimidating. Even though I offered training and I created a lot of documents—because when we started with it in 2016, that kind of documentation didn't exist—a lot of the people came into Foglight "kicking and screaming." 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'm used to it and a number of our end-users are used to it. They know where to go for the information. But some of the people who used the Diagnostic Manager from IDERA still refuse to use Foglight to this day, because it's very intimidating.

The very first time I set it up as a demo, I had it set up in less than an hour. I was really impressed. I thought for sure it was going to be a task, but I was able to set it up within an hour for a test scenario, and that was key for us. When we actually purchased it, we had one of my server engineers set it up and I asked him how hard it was. He said, "I had one of the instances set up in about 45 minutes." For him it was also very easy.

Our implementation strategy, when we set this up initially in 2016, was to break it into three groups. We had an instance of Foglight for our production servers, we had an instance of Foglight for our development servers, and we had an instance of Foglight for our servers over in Leeds, in the United Kingdom. That way, we could use the federated Foglight to look at all of them, but we could also just look at the production stuff or the development setup, et cetera.

I wish I could give you a number, but it definitely does save us time. The logging it has saves us time because we can use the timeline and go back. We've had people say, "What happened 17 hours ago at this time?" We can use Foglight to go back and see what happened. It could have been that at nine o'clock the previous night there had been an issue they weren't aware of. We can use Foglight to go back and check that out. SQL Server doesn't keep those kinds of logs. Fortunately Foglight does. It has saved us more time than I can count.

The pricing has never been a question. We just renewed in November, for the fifth year in a row. It's never a question of whether we need to renew this or the Premiere Support.

When we first started looking at Foglight, we wanted to go to a web-based operation, so our end-users wouldn't have to install a program on their computers. We wanted a setup where all they had to do was log in to something. I found Foglight through a Google search, of course, and thought I would give it a try. As I said, within an hour, I had things set up and running, whereas with the IDERA Web Solution I was having all kinds of problems. IDERA's web solution was just coming out at that time, in 2016. We haven't looked back ever since. We have never questioned, "Should we go to another solution?"

We do wish the Foglight interface was less confusing, but with a few of us who know how to look at it, read it, and interpret the data, it's a good solution. We just wish more end-users would take advantage of it.

Don't be afraid of the interface, because you can't break anything. Click on absolutely anything and everything you can find. That's how I learned it. I took a good two or three weeks, once we did implement this. Anytime I could click on something, I was clicking on it just to see where it was going to take me. I would jot some notes down to tell me, "This took me here, that took me there." Don't be afraid to click on something.

If my mouse will click on it, then I'll click on it. If anything, it's going to give me some information that I might not have had before. And if it leads me down a dead end road, I just back out of it. In that situation it may be because it's information that is either over my head, or it's information that's not needed. But I'm not afraid to click on anything because Foglight is there to help me. It's like tapping somebody on the shoulder and saying, "Hey, what's going on in here?"

When you purchase it you will get a liaison. I would recommend touching base with them as often as you can. The forums for Quest have also come a long way since 2016. Back then, they were barely existent, but they've come a long way. Use the forums. Don't be afraid to ask questions. There's no such thing as a stupid question because if you're asking, then you know somebody else has asked it.

Sometimes we'll use Foglight to drill down and see what's causing an issue. If things are baseline normal for us and we've already eliminated the database as being an issue, then we have to look at the server team, the network team, and even web support to see if they are alright. We really don't use it to track server activity other than CPU usage, memory usage, and the like. When we drill down, even though we've eliminated the database as the source of the issue, we use Foglight because sometimes it will show that we're getting some CXPACKET issues, which tells us it might be a network issue. So we do look at some of the other aspects of it, after eliminating the database as the issue, to troubleshoot.

The solution also has the capability to monitor a variety of aspects, such as the OS, hybrid clouds, and hardware across different platforms, but we really don't use that because we have a server team that does so. It monitors the system utilization. Of course, we can see if there's a load somewhere or if memory is being excessively hit. If the disk is busy, we might look at that and tell the storage team that they might want to look at their disk drives. Is there a problem going on with the storage state? Or the server team might look at the servers and say, "Yeah, the servers are being excessively hit." It's a good catch-all, but we can only make suggestions with Foglight when it comes to anything outside of the databases. When it is inside of the databases, Foglight gives us a wealth of information that we can take to the table and say, "This is what we found to be the problem, and this is what we think should be the solution."

In terms of using it to proactively alert us to long-running queries, we're getting into that frame of mind. We have it available, but a lot of our developers have created their own little pieces of code that check things on their side, to alert them, and those are not necessarily run through Foglight. We do use the alarms a little bit for checking on our availability groups to see if a failover has happened because we may not be aware of it. We also have alerts set up for databases that might not be backed up recently. We use that almost daily. Overall, we don't use the alarm part of it as much as we should, but we're getting there.

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 to monitor about 500 instances, 500 servers, and it keeps up with everything. I monitor Foglight. I wake up in the morning and it's the first thing I look at, because I can depend on it.

We have it on VMs in-house and it performs very well.

The solution has nothing to do with how the organization functions. It has a lot to do with how I do my job, and how I can help the organization stay on top of things. I need to know, from the ground up, what's going on and when it is happening. The tool allows me to know that. I don't know that the company realizes the value of it. Of course they do, because they're paying for it, but the DBA team, for sure, knows the value of it.

It allows me to do more than I could otherwise. The tool does your job for you in a lot of ways. If I had to collect all that information myself about 500 different instances, I'd need a year to do it. It does that every day. Now, I'm free to fight those fights and still have time to do the upgrades and do the other things, the fun stuff, including building stuff, instead of just troubleshooting all the time. It brings with it a growth factor too, for any DBA that wants to show their value. Just watching a monitored screen is not going to provide much value, in the eyes of the bosses. But when you can do that and do upgrades and other stuff in a week, then you start to show value. It provides you time to do everything else because it does so much.

We also get emails from Foglight every day about long running queries, long running jobs, and broken jobs. Again, it's really doing my job for me. I just have to respond to it. It tells me what I need to do and I do it.

We can also drill down and do root cause analysis for most things. That's a huge benefit of the tool. We mostly have Windows boxes. Between the drill-down for root cause and Event Viewer, you can decipher what the root cause of anything was, or just prove what it was. The same information comes out of Foglight that would come out of Event Viewer. It saves us tons of time. I couldn't do all of my job in one week if I didn't have the tool. The company would probably have to hire another person if we didn't have it.

We created a dashboard called "Morning Coffee," and when I'm having my coffee in the morning, everything that has happened, good or bad, shows up on that dashboard. That's my favorite, because that's where I make my money. That's where I show my value to the company, because when things start to tilt in the wrong direction, I know it. To me, that's huge. You could talk about the emails that come out that tell you the server is down—any application can do that. But to collectively have information for all 500 instances, at my fingertips, is huge.

That dashboard is custom made. The gentleman I work with, Brant, actually created the dashboard. He has a section for failed jobs. He has a section for failed backups. He has a section for servers down, which hopefully is never populated. Everything you'd want to know about anything that happened while you were sleeping is there, and it's actually there for however long is necessary. It could be 24 hours. It could be two weeks.

Also, it never seems to fail on the alerts. The alerts are solid.

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 solution also provides real-time activity screens. You can drill down into real-time for

• CPU
• memory
• disk space
• sessions
• activity
• transactions. 

Anything you want to see is there, and there's a drill-down for each server that shows you that information. It's a separate page that comes up, and shows you, like a dashboard does, everything at once. Then you can drill down further into anything there that might show a problem or a problem that is about to happen. That drill-down feature and the ability to see everything that's going on, on the server, is a really nice feature. It's great because you want a screen to show you stuff before the end-user screams, and this feature allows you to know that information. With it, I know when things are going awry before the end-user does, and you can't ask for more out of a tool.

It also enables us to monitor multiple database platforms. We monitor, in-house, something like eight versions of SQL, most of which are on different OSs, different servers, different hardware. We're not doing Oracle yet.

The Performance Investigator feature in this tool is really good. We only use it for production, but it drills down to the narrowest bit. If you were to log in to my system, I could tell you, the next day, when you logged in. If the SA account logged in three months ago, I can tell you that. The SQL PI is really a huge feature in the tool.

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. While the tool allows you to prioritize those, based on the severity of the server—if it's high-level production or low-level production—I'd like to know, by having something tell me, if I'm not in front of the screen, that I have a server down.

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 have been using Quest Foglight for Databases solidly for two years. Prior to that, I used it off and on for another two to three years.

The stability has been awesome. In the last six months we've had one slowdown, and it was easily resolved. We rebooted the environment and it went away. That's one hitch in two years.

It does a much better job, when it comes to scalability, than Grid Control. We've got 500 instances, just SQL, on there. That's huge. I can see that it would handle another 500.

Their technical support is great. They are super-fabulous. You open up a ticket and someone always gets back to you either by email or on a phone call. They're really good. I'm an Oracle guy, and I used Oracle support forever, and it's tremendous what Quest does as far as support goes. It's their standard support and it's wonderful.

I wasn't here for the brand-new implementation. They've been using it for longer than I've been here, but I've been adding to the environment as we go along.

When you introduce a new target, a new server into Foglight, that is really straightforward. They make it so simple to do and it does all the work. You say, "This is what I want. This is the name," and it goes after it, and it installs agents everywhere they need to be on the OS to launch the database. It's a two- or three-minute process, if that. That part is wonderful.

For maintenance, for our environment, we need two DBAs: one full-time, and one helper. That's how we have it now. Brant and I handle the environment. He's the lead, and I'm his backup, but I'm there every step of the way. The two of us use it 100 percent every day. We have six or seven users of the solution and, if you include management, there are probably 12, as we have that many accounts in the tool. All of the users are DBAs.

If you don't have this tool, you need at least another body. If you think of the going rate for a DBA, and at least one or even two of them, annually, that is ROI. 

In addition, you're not going to get the work done, work that the tool does for you, before you even wake up in the morning. It really is immeasurable. If you've never had Foglight, you don't know. But if you used to work without it, once you've used it, I'm not sure you'd want to do your job without it anymore.

Aside from the alerts, the emails you get in the morning, and the alarms that go off, it's the collection of data that is valuable. You can go back to any time you want, pull a report out and hand it to somebody and say, "This is what this CPU looked like for the last year and half, and we need help with it." If I had to go collect that information, it would be totally impossible. I don't know how many people you'd need to do that.

I'm an Oracle guy and I've used Oracle's Grid Control, which is similar to Foglight. Foglight offers so much more. I was an instructor and I actually taught Grid Control. While Grid Control is good, I'm not sure it's as stable or as powerful, but it's good. It does the same type of thing. It handles a server with any of the databases on there. 

One thing that Grid Control does, and I'm not sure if Foglight does this—and it would be a nice-to-have—is that it enables me to pick out two or three servers in my environment and do a comparison among them. 

If Foglight had that, that would be really nice for a multitude of reasons, one being licensing. Thinking it through, there are a whole bunch of applications for that kind of capability. For example, if you're planning an upgrade across the board, what are you upgrading, and why? If you could pull that information out of Foglight easily, that would be great. I can create a report and get the same information, but my point is that, in Grid Control, there was a standard page that allowed me to do a comparison within the application.

The biggest thing I've learned from using it is the reduction in effort that is required to do my job. Don't tell my boss that.

My advice is "buy it." You won't know until you use it. I've been a DBA for 22 years and it really is an awesome tool.

We use Foglight to display the most intensive database queries, but it's on a per-server, per-instance basis. We haven't created a dashboard for that, although we probably should. I can drill down into a server and I can tell you, from top to bottom, which queries are the most expensive. It could help us to improve query efficiency but we don't use it that way. We have vendor-supported applications and they're responsible for that. So that's not our focal point.

Overall, it really is a good tool. I think it's the best on the market.

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.

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