Quest Foglight for APM [EOL] Review

Initially, it meant we no longer needed to spend time manually checking our existing databases/servers which freed us up for other tasks. It also captures information that we wouldn't otherwise have.

Having standard monitoring features and a central repository saves us a lot of time and reduces risk of incidents. It replaces a lot of manual tasks and makes it easier for us to be more pro-active and to prioritise issues across multiple systems. It also keeps a history which we use for post incident reviews and performance monitoring.

In an older version of Foglight, we were not able to get any of our custom agents to work properly so that feature was not as much use as we had initially hoped and haven't tried using since. Being able to incorporate other bespoke monitoring into Foglight would have made the tool even more useful.

I had some issues with the Agents in earlier versions consuming CPU and needing the occasional restart, but we've not had any issues with later versions. The system has been stable now for quite some time.

As our estate grows we can easily incorporate more servers into our existing set up.

I've always had good experience with Dell Support, who we use for other products as well. All of my queries have been answered in the past.

We chose this product over creating our own in-house monitoring procedures. It was recommended to us by several colleagues.

Creating the repository and the management server were quite simple and problem free. Getting the monitoring agents to communicate back to the management server was a bit more tricky but this was mostly down to getting the network set up correctly so not really a direct issue with Foglight itself.

At the time Foglight was still supported by Quest and they sent two representatives to spend a day at our offices to give us a presentation and then aid us through setting up Foglight on our test systems. We then had sufficient knowledge to proceed by ourselves setting up the production equivalent.

In its basic configuration Foglight is relatively easy to install and use and will make supporting a large number of servers/databases much less time consuming. It can be further customised to your own needs.