We still have a couple of more years before our license expires. Hopefully, starting next year, we will see benefit, in terms of ROI, from using Foglight.

While I don't deal with the pricing of products, so I don't know what the investment cost was, the return on investment in Foglight is quantifiable. There are definitely multiple instances where we prevent outages or resolve issues in a very timely manner.

If you don't have this tool, you need at least another body. If you think of the going rate for a DBA, and at least one or even two of them, annually, that is ROI. 

In addition, you're not going to get the work done, work that the tool does for you, before you even wake up in the morning. It really is immeasurable. If you've never had Foglight, you don't know. But if you used to work without it, once you've used it, I'm not sure you'd want to do your job without it anymore.

Aside from the alerts, the emails you get in the morning, and the alarms that go off, it's the collection of data that is valuable. You can go back to any time you want, pull a report out and hand it to somebody and say, "This is what this CPU looked like for the last year and half, and we need help with it." If I had to go collect that information, it would be totally impossible. I don't know how many people you'd need to do that.

I wish I could give you a number, but it definitely does save us time. The logging it has saves us time because we can use the timeline and go back. We've had people say, "What happened 17 hours ago at this time?" We can use Foglight to go back and see what happened. It could have been that at nine o'clock the previous night there had been an issue they weren't aware of. We can use Foglight to go back and check that out. SQL Server doesn't keep those kinds of logs. Fortunately Foglight does. It has saved us more time than I can count.

I haven't been able to pin down an exact ROI, but I can easily say that it has helped with expenses that would be related to certain issues.

I can give you one really good example. We've got 32 stores that are scattered all around the country. Foglight was able to identify that none of these were being backed up. We got an alert: "Hey, we don't have a backup for these servers." That got us to start backing up those servers. If one of those servers crashed the process was to get a new server put onsite. They would have to start from scratch, install SQL, create a blank database, and then have to spend 24 to 48 hours getting it caught up with information that the system already had, back here. In the process, they lost two days of sales but they also lost the data that was on that server.

We got a call one day that one of the servers crashed. We had a server sitting in the shop and rushed it out to them in an hour. They said, "Okay, we did a restore of the database," and within 20 minutes they were ready to open the shop. They called the store manager and said, " Okay, you're up and running, ready to open the doors again." And she said, "I just sent everybody home. I thought we were going to be out for two days."

We were able to resolve the issue because we were aware of it. That's what I like about Foglight. It does help us to be aware of potential issues and even get ahead of them.

We have seen ROI. It was a good investment because now we have insight into the health and performance of our databases. Previously, there were a lot of unknowns and risks. Now, we can be proactive with our database health. In addition to that, we were able to get a lot more insights into how our databases are being used. We have also leveraged some of the custom dashboarding. We did a custom dashboard to monitor one of our data synchronization screens. This was handy because we just published that as part of the Foglight, as an additional dashboard.

Have no idea