Quest Foglight for Databases Reviews

Name: Quest Foglight for Databases
Brand: Quest Software
Rating: 4 (10 reviews)

Vendor: Quest Software

4.3 out of 5

10 reviews
91% willing to recommend

181 followers

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What is Quest Foglight for Databases?UNIXBusinessApplication
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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

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Quest Foglight for Databases is the #2 ranked solution in top Database Development and Management solutions. PeerSpot users give Quest Foglight for Databases an average rating of 8.6 out of 10. Quest Foglight for Databases is most commonly compared to Oracle Enterprise Manager: Quest Foglight for Databases vs Oracle Enterprise Manager. Quest Foglight for Databases is popular among the large enterprise segment, accounting for 65% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a financial services firm, accounting for 15% of all views.

Buyer's Guide

Quest Foglight for Databases

May 2024

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Featured reviews

Vadim Kulikov

Senior Engineer at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

Nov 11, 2022

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. It could be just the nature of the beast, it could be the fact that it's web-based, as opposed to Spotlight being a fat client running on C#. I use both tools in conjunction with each other; they are a part of the toolset. Foglight might not be as helpful. It's also possible that part of the issue is how Foglight is deployed. We always try to save on cost and because it requires a SQL license, you don't necessarily have the luxury of putting it on a super fast server. It could be related to that. But I have noticed that it's not as responsive for determining, in real time, what's going on. The way I have understood things is that there was an attempt to merge Spotlight functionality with Foglight. They have somewhat done that, even though I still feel that they're not going to be able to completely kill Spotlight. That tool is done so well and it's really serving a purpose in terms of a real-time, very fast analysis of multiple metrics. I don't like what they did with Foglight because it's an attempt to merge. It's like a sports car versus a heavy-duty truck. They are both fantastic, but when you try to jack up a truck to work fast, it doesn't work very well.

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Vinothsingh Elumalai

Lead Software Engineer at Lowe's Companies

Dec 20, 2020

There have been times where the database guys have used Foglight to find the root cause and it has taken longer than anticipated. One type of feedback we have gotten from our DB guys, especially when it comes to root cause, is that Foglight can improve. There are tools on the market that actually show where the issue is happening. It could be a performance issue or it could be another issue that is causing the database to go down. What we have been told by our DB guys is that Foglight should improve when it comes to root cause analysis. There are thousands of objects within the Foglight Management Server. At times what happens is that these objects consume a lot of resources and that causes the database, or Foglight itself, to go down. To then identify which object is consuming a lot of resources is really difficult. At times it's very cumbersome. It would help if they could ensure that the performance of their tool is improved. Maybe they can try to eliminate some of those thousands of objects and just keep the important ones that are really necessary. Or if they can come up with a way to let customers know what objects are causing, or potentially cause, performance issues and then give an option to the customer to change the threshold on those objects, that would help. I'm stressing this point because there have been cases where Foglight has gone down and, because of that, all the database servers have been impacted. One of the reasons was that some of the host processes, and the objects related to the databases, were breaching the default threshold. It takes us some time to identify that and then change the threshold and work with the Quest team to bring the tool back up. Foglight should really work on that and come up with a handy solution.

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reviewer2011635

Sales & Operations Planning Manager at a retailer with 201-500 employees

Nov 2, 2022

The alarms and the SQL PI features are both very useful, and we are happy to have them. 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 drill-down capability is mostly for historical investigation. The solution also provides real-time activity screens. For example, there is a feature that shows us the connected users or the current CPU utilization or even the top activities inside the database server. This information allows us to perform troubleshooting on a real-time basis, as opposed to in a post-mortem or historical investigation. Whenever there is an issue taking place, we can use the real-time features to look into the issues right away. That means the solution we provide will be a lot more timely.

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Quest Foglight for Databases market share

As of June 2024, the market share of Quest Foglight for Databases in the Database Development and Management category stands at 6.1%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year, according to calculations based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Database Development and Management

Key learnings from peers

Valuable Features

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

Room for Improvement

"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 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."
"When we decided to go with Foglight, a lot of people stopped using the diagnostics part because it was very intimidating... They still won't use it because they feel it's too intimidating. They will open something up and not know what to do. It's not very user-friendly. You have to click on a lot of stuff to find the information."

Pricing

"This is like the "Cadillac" of performance monitoring software. It's not cheap... I am currently with a company that I was able to convince that the product is worth the cost."
"It is cost-effective. With our EA, it is really based on the scale of our database environment. We found the Quest team to be reasonable and flexible when it comes to pricing and scaling of licenses."
"Compared to the other tools on the market, Foglight is okay in terms of pricing and licensing."

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

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