I have had a look at other tools including Redgate SQL Toolbelt and Idera. They are monitoring solutions and they each have something that I like very much, but none of them came close to the comprehensiveness of Foglight. It's a very mature product and has been around for a very long time. 

I am a little bit biased and I told my team, "Look guys, I have used a lot of tools but I like this the best. I'm very biased because I have used Quest tools so much. I am very proficient with them, so you need to check me on this." We had multiple meetings and presentations and there was agreement that Foglight, while being the most expensive tool, was the most comprehensive. The value was there.

There are tools out there these days to build something like Foglight on a budget. But if you go that route, what you don't have is a team of engineers who are subject matter experts who are working directly with the database vendor so that they're ahead of all the new features. When new features come out, if you have a "homemade" system, you have to stop what you're doing and concentrate on improving your solution.

I go to presentations often and there are some brilliant DBAs who have built their own dashboards, and I'm very impressed. These guys are unbelievable. But if I ask them, "So how much time does it take you to maintain it?" they usually won't tell me. A lot of the time, they don't maintain it because they build it for what they think they need. But eventually, if you stop maintaining a product, it becomes less accurate.

You have to evaluate your labor and how much time you're spending on maintaining a product as opposed to providing value for your company. If a product like Foglight is updated and functions well, it's kind of cliche, but it's like having a full-time DBA on staff for which you're only paying the cost of a license. The couple of hundred dollars for a license is basically a DBA that you have hired because you don't have to do those things. The tool does them for you.

It's not even the time involved, it's also a matter of staying focused on something. You can only juggle so many balls. If you constantly have to concentrate on tinkering with performance monitoring, you're not spending as much time developing your solutions.

We evaluated SolarWinds intensively, among multiple applications, before we decided on Foglight.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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