A lot of things that Foglight does could be derived from DMVs and extended events. I'm going to sound like a salesperson, but I have to be a salesperson to sell the value of a product to my company. They need to understand that to answer some of the questions they ask, not having a tool like this will make my answers very speculative.

As a DBA, you have to be able to answer three questions. The first is: What's happening right now? Why is the system slow or why are things not responding? That is probably the most trivial for an experienced DBA. That is where the tool's value might not be as obvious, as you can look at the sp_who or DMV and pretty much tell what's going on without having to pay money for a license for a product like Foglight.

The second question is: What just happened? There could be just a couple of seconds difference between the first and second questions. But the effort to answer the second question is significantly higher because it is water under the bridge. You need some kind of monitoring solution implemented, even if it's just a basic solution where you capture a certain timeframe, so you can roll back and review what just happened. However, there will still be a significant amount of speculation because, usually, you can't afford to monitor every single metric, and there are hundreds of them. The issue could be the OS, it could be infrastructure-related, or it could be that the SQL code is not performing well because it's not written well. So the second question is significantly harder to answer, and that's where a tool like this will become very helpful.

The third question is: What has been going on? That is by far the hardest question to answer without this type of tool. This is the type of question a manager might ask for the purposes of resource planning. Or a senior VP might say, "Hey, how are we doing? Can we bring on another customer? Can we sustain a 20 percent increase in workload?" I don't know how I would answer that question without having this type of solution. I work in the industry quite a bit and there is, unfortunately, a lot of misunderstanding due to a lack of a comprehensive view of infrastructure.

There's no way to answer that question without getting some kind of baseline tool. Unfortunately, in most of the shops I work for, only one question is usually being answered relatively accurately, and that is "What is going on?" And it's a luxury because by the time a customer escalates an issue and it gets interpreted by support people, there's a gap. That gap could be a couple of minutes, a couple of hours, or a couple of days.

We are using version 5.9.5 as well as 5.9.7. Ours is a huge database infra so we are using two different environments to monitor our corporate and store servers.

We have thousands of DB servers that have to be monitored across our environment, which includes Lowe's stores across the U.S. We support the infra and the monitoring for all the stores and the store-related applications, as well as the servers which support those applications. With the DB servers being an integral part of all those applications, we thought we should have a separate monitoring tool just to monitor them.

Foglight ensures that we have a dedicated monitoring tool to monitor all our store and corporate DB servers.

Foglight is used by our company to monitor production and development databases. It's being used to alert us if there are any database issues, including availability and those that are server-related. We also use Foglight SQL PI (Performance Investigator) features to troubleshoot any performance issues.

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.

Primarily, we use it to monitor about 1,500 databases for availability and for database space, among other metrics.

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.

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.

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.

We use the solution for SQL Server and auction. We have a couple of customers using it for the other case. Other customers are also extending the infrastructure monitoring from the virtualization and the storage.

I used it when working for a client, in a situation where you takeover management of the systems.