Quest Foglight for APM [EOL] Reviews

This product has helped our customers discover Java performance issues in their WebLogic applications.

The most valuable feature is drill-down monitoring, which shows us from one interface the transaction chain from the front end to back end. Another interesting thing is that this product can work with many databases including freeware (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL). So, it can seriously reduce TCO.

I want to see a new interface that contains HTML5 features. The current version of Foglight (on-premise edition) is so fusty in comparison with leaders of Gartner APM Quadrant - i.e. Appdynamics, NewRelic, Dynatrace. If you try to compare SaaS and on-premise Foglight versions you can see differences in UI-design. It's my subjective experiences, but SaaS version looks more modern. Hope this helps

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. This is a stable solution.

I rate the level of customer service and technical support 9/10, because 10 is an unattainable ideal. These guys are working fine and really want to help.

Initial setup is really easy. You can install this product by clicking "next-next-next", and it will work fine.

I suggest implementing this solution with the vendor or a system integrator. Otherwise, it could take a long time to find all of its interesting features and possibilities.

This is a difficult question. Many vendors have tried to calculate this measurement, but it's very, very subjective, and their attempts were not successful (IMHO).

I'm a system architect and I receive requests from potential customers. I also have experience with BMC, AppDynamics and New Relic.

You can choose this product if you want to connect Java (or .NET) to database monitoring, because you can see the application’s different activities on the same screen.

This is our solution, which works as a framework in the Foglight interface, and changes the color of the geo-tags depending on the object status.

I’m a DBA for a big e-commerce site. Foglight quickly helped us reduce the amount of money lost.

Its module history query increased DBA efficiency. 90% of the time, we couldn’t catch problems in real time. This module helped us with that.

One night at 01:00, we had several customers’ purchase attempts time out, and result in a half-hour outage. Foglight stored the bad queries and we quickly identified the bad code that locked the main database. We corrected it with the developer team.

It provides a history of the activities on our SQL servers.

I would perhaps like to see more SSMS connections.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was straightforward.

The stability we have as a result of using it made up for the cost of the product within a month.

A DBA is needed to use Foglight correctly.

We are able to view infrastructure through a single pane of glass and are able to build services and SLA.

Infrastructure Monitoring and End User Monitoring are the product’s most valuable features to me.

Application Monitoring. We are running a Webmethods stack (Software AG) and Foglight is unable to instrument. We are in a POC with Dynatrace and it was able to instrument with little effort.

To be honest, we have stopped using customer support and technical support because of the slow pace in which our SR's are resolved. We often fix the issues before Dell support is able to.

I did not form part of the initial setup but have subsequently been involved in the deploy of a new setup. I found that it is a bit complex if you have no background in ESM.

We implemented our initial implementation with the vendor and we have subsequently deployed the latest version in house and we were able to implement seamlessly.

We have not realized a good ROI on the product due to the fact that we were not able to monitor our core application which runs on Webmethods . We are also unable to monitor AS400 DB2 database transactions, which results in a broken telephone effect.

Foglight is an awesome tool and it is able to instrument and integrate easily with any monitoring tool. However, you have to have a good knowledge of software development, as well as a proper understanding of architecture and infrastructure.

Initially, it meant we no longer needed to spend time manually checking our existing databases/servers which freed us up for other tasks. It also captures information that we wouldn't otherwise have.

Having standard monitoring features and a central repository saves us a lot of time and reduces risk of incidents. It replaces a lot of manual tasks and makes it easier for us to be more pro-active and to prioritise issues across multiple systems. It also keeps a history which we use for post incident reviews and performance monitoring.

In an older version of Foglight, we were not able to get any of our custom agents to work properly so that feature was not as much use as we had initially hoped and haven't tried using since. Being able to incorporate other bespoke monitoring into Foglight would have made the tool even more useful.

I had some issues with the Agents in earlier versions consuming CPU and needing the occasional restart, but we've not had any issues with later versions. The system has been stable now for quite some time.

As our estate grows we can easily incorporate more servers into our existing set up.

I've always had good experience with Dell Support, who we use for other products as well. All of my queries have been answered in the past.

We chose this product over creating our own in-house monitoring procedures. It was recommended to us by several colleagues.

Creating the repository and the management server were quite simple and problem free. Getting the monitoring agents to communicate back to the management server was a bit more tricky but this was mostly down to getting the network set up correctly so not really a direct issue with Foglight itself.

At the time Foglight was still supported by Quest and they sent two representatives to spend a day at our offices to give us a presentation and then aid us through setting up Foglight on our test systems. We then had sufficient knowledge to proceed by ourselves setting up the production equivalent.

In its basic configuration Foglight is relatively easy to install and use and will make supporting a large number of servers/databases much less time consuming. It can be further customised to your own needs.

Over all in my organization, this product helped us to maintain health, risk and efficiency of the virtual infrastructure. With virtual network switch support, administrators get full visibility into bottlenecks.

Dell Foglight does analyze and optimize your virtual infrastructure. It definitely reduces operational cost.

I think installation and setup needs little more improvement especially when you are installing with external database. 

We've had no issues with stability.

We've had no issues with scalability.

Overall I loved the product. Easy to navigate and gives very detailed information on every piece that you are looking for.

Workload analysis (database workload in active time) they should more information data and analyze wait state analysis is valuable data to predictions or clarify issue.

I want to see mobile access application in the next release. 

We have had no stability issues.

There have been no issues with scaling it for our needs.

Get more requirement from your customer if they have a performance issue with a critical database. You should read carefully the release notes and prerequisites before implementation. Ask your customer for hardware sizing and credentials. For Foglight performance analysis, you need to create a new database schema on your monitored host and you need at least 1GB space on a monitored host for storing data and logs.

If there is a customer complaining we can playback and prove what really happened.

FxV is valuable as we can playback the session.

They need to improve the stability of FxM and FxV.

In my experience sometimes the state of FxM/FxV hangs, then I have to manually reboot the appliance.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

I've never had to open a case with support.

It was straightforward to set-up.

We used a vendor team to implement it.

We keep an eye on high latency, so we can handle bottlenecks before they become a bigger problem.

VMware environment. Because of the overall view of the VMware environment. As well as the alerting. At a glance I can easily see what is going on with all of my VMware environments, including top consumers of resources.

Since our purchase, the product has split in many ways. It needs to have more simplified – buy one buy all licensing. The “cartridge” concept for every little thing is a bit of a bother to implement.

We've had no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

Technical Support has been excellent. Since we originally purchased, Dell purchased Quest – and the support is excellent.

Dell OpenManage and HP InsightManager provide different kinds of hardware level information, and we did not find suitable for our VM guest monitoring.

The only issue I have had is with the “cartridge” concept, and the different updates to that. I am looking forward to trying the newer version sometime. Right now, this version just works well the way it is for what I want it for.

We implemented it ourselves.

Since the product split – the licensing is a bit more complex.

Our project consisted in a company wide upgrade to Vsphere 6. Part of the deployment project was to evaluate, external tools, to manage and report on the new Vsphere 6 implementation. Dell Foglight was selected because it's ease of deployment, ase to train the IT team on the new product, created several custom Dashboards, Alarms and Reports to be accessed by different groups within the organization (e.g. Compute, Storage, Networking and Operations).

• Easy to install and deploy (including Federated Environments)
• End-to-End visibility and management for all the components/objects of a virtualized environment (VCs, Hosts, VMs, vstorage, vnetworking etc.) and Citrix (XenDesktop and XenApp), and VDI
• Intuitive, Single-pane-of-glass dashboards for real-time statistics and long-term statistics for capacity management and in-depth analytics
• Fully scalable architecture for federated environments
• Fully customizable alerts, dashboards and reports

It needs a more intuitive way to create and implement custom "Cartridges" to be deployed through out a Federated environment.

We have had no issues with the stability.

We have had no issues with scaling it for our needs.

Excellent. Dell and Quest have a great and very knowleagable support team

One of the main factors in our decision to select and implement Foghlight was the ease of installation and deployment. The product comes as an OVA Appliance and takes less than an hour to install. Once the product is install the configuration is very straightforward. After assigning and connecting to the Virtual Centers the object discovery begins and most of the Standard Dashboards will be populated. After the standard Dashboards, Analysis and Reports are available the user can create and deploy custom "Cartridges" to create custom Collections, perform Custom Analysis, and generate custom Alarms and Reports.

The product comes as an OVA Appliance and takes less than an hour to install. Once the product is installed, the configuration is very straightforward. After assigning and connecting to the Virtual Centers the object discovery begins and most of the Standard Dashboards will be populated

I was a contrcator dedicated to the Virtualization Tools team. We implemented and configured the product in-house with help from Dell support.

We evaluated several other solutions from (Solar Winds, Nagios, Veeam, VMTurbo, HP...etc). Foglight Enterprise was the most scalable and easy to deploy tool.

This is the new release, and it has some new modules that can be better integrated. I joined the Dell and Quest Forums and User Groups to get feedback from the user and support communities.

We are able to monitor all of our applications and with the APM and tie them into a service and our operations team and quickly view all services and pinpoint where the issue would be if its at the application layer or database layer.

The Application Performance Monitor is one of the most valuable tools you can have in your bag for monitoring. With the APM you can replay the end user session and see issues quickly by viewing the session. This has helped us many times with issues such as promo codes not working and customers unable to get to a particular page to end the checkout process.

My only complaint from Foglight for monitoring is that you only get a plot for five minute average for metrics like CPU and Memory, on the application side I can see metrics more quickly at 15 seconds for metrics like active sessions, heap. I would like to see the same for CPU and memory.

We have had no issues with the stability.

There have been no issues scaling it for our needs.

Foglight Support is great most of the time, support and help with what ever level your issue is.

We chose this product because it could do all the monitoring we where looking for , CPU, MEMORY, SQL, AD, and EXC. The biggest reason we chose this was the end user monitoring

It's straightforward after you understand the terminology in Foglight.

We implemented in house but ran into many issues with all of the pieces of Foglight had to purchase Professional Services.

Our ROI has been great it has saved us many times to resolve issues before customers started complaining.

Foglight can be expensive I would go with the pricing at a three year deal.

Open tickets with support and discuss the pieces of what you are implementing it with support.