Quest Foglight for APM [EOL] Reviews

It has minimized induced downtime. We can watch the performance instantly and continuously.

Formed on our system and we're watching events that may occur. We find the source of the problem easily. Sometimes we can solve problems before they occur.

There are no new changes in our expectations, because we use for many years.

We have had no issues with the stability.

We had no issues scaling it for our needs.

We are going to contact the vendor (Dataserv) if a problem occurs. So far they have found the solution to all our problems.

The installation is simple, but it takes time to adapt them to the structure.

We work constantly with the vendor's engineer.

The price is expensive for us.

When we chose this product did not have too many alternatives.

I would recommend this product as it's been very successful for us.

It provided an extra layer of monitoring specifically focused on database infrastructure.

Real time database monitoring and alerting are valuable.

The version compatibility needs work.

Stability was always an issue in large environments.

Often times management servers would become overwhelmed.

I never had to deal with support channels.

We didn't have anything in place previously.

I was not involved in this process.

I recall it being a very expensive solution relative to function and stability.

You need to scale it wisely.

Given that we track performance we can often see issues happening before users are affected. We also gain some insight into our business partners performance and can often point out to them when they're having issues to help them get in front of issues.

The ability to track performance of an application or application suite over time is extremely valuable to our business partners and for our application development team with near real time results. Additionally the ability to track both real and synthetic user performance and compare real to synthetic user performance as a baseline is important to us on several fronts; real users make human decisions and we can see how their performance compares to "perfect" synthetic users running scripts to do similar tasks. And because our synthetic users run consistently 24/7 we also can compare peak traffic performance to off peak performance.

Overall the development of Foglight has been spot on for our use. There are some metrics I'd like to track that are difficult to find or implement into a tracking solution without a lot of manual work and there is some proprietary nomenclature that can be confusing but I don't expect either to be resolved.

We've had no issues with its stability.

The scalability is fine except for the cost.

Excellent, very responsive, very friendly, knowledgeable and quick to assign to the correct support people, I've never had any issue on any of the dozens (hundreds?) of tickets I've opened over the last four years.

We currently use multiple systems for monitoring including OEM, Splunk, Apex, Nagios, there are others. Foglight is the best overall solution we use, but it doesn't do everything we need or doesn't provide the best solution to everything we want to monitor.

It's very straightforward, and had good documents. We got great vendor support.

Combination, the vendor was over the shoulder as we implemented.

I don't know anything about this, but the business seems happy about it.

Ensure that you set aside money to get training from Dell. The system is complex and has quirks that aren't readily apparent without knowledge.

The extensive monitoring tools embedded in Foglight are a real asset. You can really drill deep into the how and why an alert was created.

As a systems operator, Foglight helped with pinpointing issues with database performance and thus improved our reaction speed. The information we received wasn't just general, it's really extensive.

I recall that the lay-out was rather dull when I used this particular version of Foglight. I'm not sure if this was a user settings or not but a fully grey-white theme with sparse highlights made it sometimes difficult to find my way around. I had some issues with finding acknowledged alerts. Although I think some settings could have been managed by better by the customer, but I read that this was alleviated in future versions.

I've probably used Foglight for about two years. After that, the customer switched to another solution.

From the few talks that I had with the responsible software engineers at our customer I can safely say that deployment happened with relative ease.

As long as the software was in use we did not encounter any technical issues.

As long as the software was in use we did not encounter any technical issues.

I was not in contact with Dell for Foglight technical issues, this was handled by our customer.

Our customer migrated to SCOM for most of their monitoring.

While I did not implement Foglight, I would always advice everyone to just compare all options and pick the one that suits their organization best. Some companies like to analyze any and all alerts to the very core by using a varied amount of tools while others require way simpler monitoring.

Quicker turnaround on MTTR, a better understanding of real time impact. Proactive approach to capacity and growth within the company from the historical data gathered. Understanding and making SLA’s achievable and accurate to both the customer and business. Reporting improvements through the level of data available and the ability to automate.

Capacity on database and file servers. I found the algorithms to forecast growth and concerns particularly intuitive. Real time mapping of services and the compliance of SLA’s, ultimately adding all the dependencies’ to key systems. This level of viewable monitoring had many benefits such as alerting, scalability, reporting and service dashboard we could promote.

SQL agents often failed but again this may have been addressed in future versions.

There was no issue with the stability.

The size of the database, thought is required in the amount of metrics you wish to capture and the duration.

Support is always available and we received good onsite training from a Dell representative, but with business this doesn't come cheap and is expected.

It was a decision made by the management, so not privy to the reasons and I wasn't around for the previous monitoring solution.

In Foglight we like the ability to log-on and review the history, as well as receive notifications when certain monitored agents notice issues.

We have been better able to respond to issues before they become a big issue.

The upgrade process could use some fine tuning. I have done an upgrade of the system as well as added\updated agents, and sometimes that process is a bit cumbersome, and does not go as planned. The JAVA monitor agent also definitely could be more streamlined in terms of monitoring and updating. Also they could use an easier method of 'archiving' data that you do not need necessarily as well as updating agent monitor thresholds.

As an update to this, we recently went through an upgrade and went to a newer version (Foglight 5.6.11.3). I would have to say the upgrade process was much better more seamless than previous upgrades. The only item\s that were an issue were the Java EE cartridges for monitoring our Java Weblogic instance. But even that was more straight forward than previous upgrades.

Since we will be upgrading to a newer ERP version next year, I will review and update this post to see what if any changes were needed (Cartridge, FMS, Agents) to continue monitoring our new ERP version/release.

Foglight 5.6.3 Foglight Experience Monitor 5.6.2

With the original deployment there was a learning curve as well as a understanding of how Foglight all came together. Again, when we originally deployed we deployed on a much earlier version which was much more cumbersome to implement.

We had some initial issues with stability as the initial deployment was on 32bit architecture. With the next release we were able to go to 64bit which helped a lot with stability of the system (memory usage, CPU).

In terms of scalability we have so far not encountered any issues. We are running on the delivered MySQL database (stand alone). We are currently up to about 80GB of data, and it is performing fine with no major issues to date.

Customer Service:

The level of customer service has been great to date. Response time and the ability understand the issue and assist\pass on to the right person\group to respond has been very good. I have not had too much of a need for customer service since Dell purchased them so it will be interesting to see if the same level of customer service is maintained.

Technical Support:

Technical support has been pretty good at responding\resolving issues. They have a fairly good understanding of the issue at hand and seem pretty good at providing solutions.

The initial setup was a bit complex due to the need to fine tune the monitor thresholds as well as make sure all the agents are monitoring. We also had a bit of a curve on the PeopleSoft monitoring (tuxedo, weblogic, application server, process scheduler) due to not too much documentation available when we first setup.

We initially implemented through a vendor team and then took on the responsibilities in-house after getting some knowledge transfer. The initial level of expertise left a bit to be desired as it didn't go as planned. However, upon expressing our concerns\issues to them they brought in a senior implementer who got things on track.

We have no hard figures on the ROI on this product, however having the system has saved us time in terms of debugging and getting to the root cause of issues. Instead of discussing with the OS\Network\Hardware\DBA teams, we have the ability to pin point the issue a lot quicker and determine which if any teams to involve for issue resolution. This can save minutes to hours per incident, which in turn allows us to focus more on other aspects of the system.

Our initial setup cost was the licensing\implementation\knowledge transfer\hardware gear. Unsure about the final setup cost. The day to day cost of using this product is minimal. Once the system is up and running it requires very little maintenance (once you get the hardware specs\system tuning\configuration as you need\want).

We did evaluate other options. One option that was evaluated was BMC.

I would recommend having an expert do the initial installation and then do a thorough knowledge transfer (shadowing them is also a good idea).

Realtime email and pager alerts and history reports provide valuable information for DBAs to resolve the issues.

Monitoring data provides valuable information for DBA to monitor space usage and tuneup database parameters which help to reduce outages to critical applications.

Migrating to newer versions is always a challenge with Foglight. I look forward seeing improvements there.

5 years

We haven't encountered any issues with deployment.

We haven't encountered any issues with stability.

We haven't encountered any issues with scalability.

I haven't had direct interaction with the tech support.

Yes, we evaluated IBM Tivoli monitor.

Foglight has been our go to monitoring tool for several years in the DB2 and Oracle space. Real time monitoring alerts and history reports provide useful information for DBAs to respond and resolve issues in a timely manner. I recommend the use of this product for anyone looking to monitor & stabilize their environment.

The features of the product most valuable to me are the alert system, Performance tuning (PA) and the monitoring capability.

The product has improved the way we respond to database issues as it has made us more proactive. For example: the alerts systems now gives as a global picture of locks, thresholds, etc. for our database systems.

The monitoring capability and performance tuning.

3 years

We had issues with deployment in the beginning until we had an expert guide us through the process.

Stability is not an issue if you have enough resources on your system to handle the load.

So far so good. We have not encountered any issues with scalability. This solution is being used to monitor 20 plus databases.

Customer Service: The level of customer service is good.Technical Support: The level of technical support is good.

We have a separate solution which is core for all of our other systems. Foglight was solely brought in for our databases.

The whole setup process is not complex at all. It helps to be very good technically to understand the architecture.

We did the implementation through a vendor team and they were very skilled and knowledgeable.

The advice I will give to people regarding Foglight is that the technical team who will be using this product will have to be trained well in order for the company to fully benefit from the product.

2 years

• Foglight Transaction Recorder
• Transaction Response Time
• Foglight Management Server

We are able to capture the real time user experience of our solutions and we have an understanding of overall performance.

2 years

We didn't have any issues with deployment.

We had stability issues for FTR. The player used to get hung while running the robot scripts.

We didn't have any issues with scalability.

Customer Service: GoodTechnical Support: Very Good

I think we implemented using a vendor team.

The ability to make any number of amazing dashboards in the Foglight Management Server is probably the most useful feature for me. This is really enhanced when you add the data from some of the other tools such as Foglight Experience Monitor.

I can give several examples of how this product improved how the organization functions.

When we first turned on Foglight for the first time, it was like a fire hose. It was difficult to tell which alerts were important and what was not. It took several weeks to sort through all the alerts and tune the thresholds to appropriate levels etc. It is a double edged sword because it is important to see all the data and find out what is important for your organization but it is a lot of work.

I have used Foglight professionally for about 2 years.

Dell came down and setup a demo of Foglight into our dev environment. This made it much easier to setup when it came time to do so in our production environment. We still ran into issues but with help from Dell Support, and the forums we worked through them until everything was working.

Yes, we had problems with stability after experimenting with custom agents that didn’t work properly. We were able to get everything resolved through support channels.

We didn't experience any issues.

Customer Service: 4 out of 5 – Every once in a while it would be hard to get the proper help through their ticketing service. I would have to call/message our sales rep and get them to kick the service guys in the butt. Definitely better than average.Technical Support: At one point Dell had a guy coming to our office once a month just to check how we were doing and answer questions. They did that for FREE.

Nagios, CA APM, HP SiteScope, PeopleSoft Performance Monitor and many more. We had a very large organization with different departments using different products. Many other tools are capable, but IMO not as flexible or powerful except for particular applications. Some of the CA tools were really great with JAVA applications, but Foglight could do most of what CA could do plus much more.

Initial setup was relatively complex. My organization opted to purchase the entire Foglight suite. It was tough trying to understand how to get everything talking. We had the FMS (Foglight management server), Foglight experience monitor and viewer (hardware), and Foglight performance monitor for the databases. For many of the agents to work properly on the servers you install a Foglight agent manager on each server you're monitoring.

In-house

Yes, HP’s various products (I say various because they have a lot of overlapping tech in this area), CA APM and other tools, and various other products. In my honest opinion Dell’s offerings (formerly Quest) is the most mature.

If you are just starting out, get a Foglight management server and install the agents. After seeing what that alone can do for you, then branch out to the other products especially FxM and FxV.