Quest Foglight for Databases Scalability

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

Our company is growing. It has almost doubled in size over the past few years. We do get more servers now and we are considering upgrading to the enterprise model.

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VE
Lead Software Engineer at Lowe's Companies

When we initially procured Foglight, the intention was to monitor only our corporate DB servers, of which there are around 500 to 600, including both production and QA environments.

We have now set up another six new Foglight environments to monitor our store DB servers. There are 1,800 Lowe's stores and each store has 2 DBs. So altogether we are trying to monitor 3,600 DB servers, which is a huge infra. I have heard Quest saying that they have not seen such a huge infra where any of their customers is monitoring thousands of DB servers.

The usage is really increasing and we have not even added one-sixth of the servers that we are planning to monitor. But we are facing stability issues already. I'm really worried about what will happen if we start adding more servers than those I just talked about.

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JL
Sales & Operations Planning Manager at a retailer with 201-500 employees

We have not tried to scale upward or horizontally yet. So far, the number of databases that we monitor has been organically increasing by a few percent a year. Foglight has been able to handle it. I don't think we have any significant scaling needs.

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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.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
AN
Database Administrator, Information Technology at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It does a much better job, when it comes to scalability, than Grid Control. We've got 500 instances, just SQL, on there. That's huge. I can see that it would handle another 500.

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

The scalability is very good for us. The one thing that we've been told is that when you have more than 800 databases, you have to spawn another management station. I hope that can be expanded for a single FMS (Foglight Management Server). The number of databases that one FMS can monitor in an optimum way should be more than 800. We haven't had that problem yet, but we are fast approaching that number and it's a concern.

We've never used the SQL-PI component of it but we plan to use it, and that will make it that much more beneficial. It will provide analyses of the database processes. It will be beneficial for our SQL queries and for how to approach the configuration of indices.

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JW
Database Administrator at AmTrust Financial Services, Inc.

If we were to venture outside of SQL Server and go to Oracle or any of the other products that Foglight supports, we would probably buy the cartridges that would interface with Foglight to run those as well. It's very scalable. We're very glad that we've already got our foot in the door with Quest and with Foglight, because we're familiar with it. We don't want to have to start over with somebody else.

It's used by our whole database team—that's 10 of us—but generally only three or four of us look at it. The main interface is good, but once you start drilling down, it can be very intimidating. We have about 300 developers, managers, and directors who all have access to it. Out of them, only about 25 percent of them use it. It can be a rather intimidating interface. It's not as user-friendly as it could be.

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KS
Sr. Database Administrator at a sports company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's definitely scalable. 

Now that they've moved to the SQL Server side for a SQL PI, the Performance Investigator, it's a little limiting. We've had to increase the drive sizes to capture that Performance Investigator information, but I prefer that it's in a SQL database because it's easier to report that way. Also, previously they were using a product called Infobright which stored everything on the C drive. There were a couple of times where that drive would fill up and once the C drive fills up, you can't do anything with it. I was glad that they moved to SQL. We put it on its own instance so it has its own set of drives and, more importantly, it's not on the C drive. And if we need to, we can expand it.

We'd like to increase usage of the solution if we can. I'm trying to get the application development team to use it more extensively. We also have a new warehouse that opened up and I'm trying to get the person who's supporting the application there to use it. I expect that our usage will expand.

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

Scalability is very good. You just need to make sure that your Foglight infrastructure is sized appropriately. That is where Quest Professional Services came in and gave us advice on what to watch out for, in terms of how many agents each management server can support.

One of the nice things with Foglight is that we were able to grant access outside of the DBA team, like our operations support team. For example, if they are troubleshooting an application issue, then they could quickly go into Foglight and check whether the database is up or down on the dashboard without having to call the DBAs. From that perspective, it has offloaded some of the calls to the DBAs.

SQL and Oracle are the two database platforms that we are supporting internally. From that perspective, we will continue leveraging Foglight. Even when we do start moving databases to the public cloud, it will be our first choice. We would try to evaluate and do a PoC of monitoring the cloud database with Foglight. As long as everything looks good, I don't see us deviating from the use of Foglight.

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Waleed Masad - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Manager at METS

We have nine customers using this solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten.

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it_user866433 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Database Consultant at Novaccent

Yes see other pieces I wrote regarding correctly size the backend DB Server for Foglight

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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.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.