Quest Foglight for Databases Previous Solutions

Vadim Kulikov - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

There was a prior version of the product called PASS, Performance Analysis for SQL Server. While Foglight is an eight out of 10, that product would be a nine. From what I understand, they had to change the architecture of the product because the previous implementation was very difficult to maintain. They had a completely different architecture with a memory-resident client that was scrubbing memory up to 50 times per second. That meant the tool was much more responsive and provided a lot of active information, but because of the need for internal information every time Microsoft changed its product, which now happens a lot, they had to have a team of experts to constantly work with Microsoft to modify the agent that was in memory, and it became very difficult. 

They had to move on to a different architecture, and that is the architecture we're discussing today, which is not as responsive. And while it retained a lot of functionality and added some, it lost the feel that the previous one had. 

I still rate Foglight pretty high because I can't think of any other tool that goes above five or six out of 10.

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VE
Lead Software Engineer at Lowe's Companies

Prior to Foglight, we used an open source monitoring tool called Nagios. We used that to monitor both our infra and databases. Because it was an open source tool, we needed to write a lot of custom scripts. Foglight offers a lot of out-of-the-box, database-related metrics, which the DB teams here are looking for. Foglight has helped us avoid a lot of the time needed to create custom scripts, compared to when we were using Nagios.

Ultimately we switched because we're monitoring thousands of servers. Since Nagios is an open source tool, there is a limit on the number of servers that you can monitor in a single instance. We had close to 50 Nagios instances, which were monitoring all our infra servers, including database monitoring. We wanted to have a single pane of glass to view all our database servers. We wanted one tool to monitor just the DB servers. That's the whole point of having Foglight in place.

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MM
Senior Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

I'm not aware of any previous solution. When I joined the company, Foglight was in use already.

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Buyer's Guide
Quest Foglight for Databases
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Quest Foglight for Databases. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
JW
Database Administrator at AmTrust Financial Services, Inc.

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.

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CL
Manager of Database Services at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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it_user866433 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Database Consultant at Novaccent

Use to have very basic monitoring like PRTG, N-Able, Zabbix

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Buyer's Guide
Quest Foglight for Databases
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Quest Foglight for Databases. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.