Foglight is a database performance management suite from Quest, with modules to perform cloud analytics, network performance monitoring and virtualization management, scaling to a broad, cloud / virtualization focused IT infrastructure monitoring solution.
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Hitachi Command Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
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The Hitachi Command Suite is an open source storage management option, from Hitachi Vantara.
It really depends on why my colleague is evaluating Foglight. If it is for Database monitoring and management, I highly recommend it. If it is for anything else, I would encourage them to look at others in this space.
Even as a non-IT employee, this software helps me to see how I am using the organization's digital resources. At a larger scale, where Hitachi Command Suite excels, this software allows an organization to monitor and analyze their resources and how employees and customers are utilizing them. I find this is best used when dealing with sensitive information (such as medical records), or with consumer-facing content.
Foglight allows detecting and diagnosing performance problems simplifying hybrid environments, it is a solution that has perfect features which work in a flexible and intuitive way, it allows database performance in a safe and fast way. It works perfectly with nothing else to add.
The interfaces are well designed and not overly populated with extraneous detail. Disparate but related feature sets are supported via separate interfaces that share a UX look and feel so that it doesn't feel like completely different panes of glass. Copy data management activity is still a bit clunky as it is accomplished via a re-purposed backup tool that was written to handle replicas, images and snapshots) but over all it is useable and has an interesting interface where elements are dragged onto the workflows.
Foglight was chosen years ago as a replacement for Groundwork. After 2.5 years of implementing Groundwork things were still not complete and the decision to go with a more formalized solution was made. Foglight installed easily and quickly nearly across the board and the full implementation for complex infrastructure was completed (with no Professional Services) by us in under 4 months. Nagios is a wonderful toolkit but you have to be ready to build what you need. It's flexibility and breadth are excellent features but with that comes the need to define things very tightly lest you embark on the project that never ends (see above about Groundwork). Dynatrace is an excellent APM tool and has advanced analytics but as a general infrastructure monitoring tool it is actually very expensive and to be honest does not have the same focus and full feature set that it does on it's APM (which to be fair is it's wheelhouse). vROPs (we also have) is a wonderful tool but focused (and rightly so) on satisfying the VMware engineers in the crowd and doesn't put itself out there too far to make things palatable for the non-engineering crowd.
Command Suite / Ops Center are the native tools to the Hitachi Vantara storage systems. Operating Hitachi Vantara products including VSP (370,1000,1500,5500), Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) they are paramount in leveraging the full use of the product families. The interfaces may be a bit less friendly than some of the newer green-field storage systems that have 'point and click' / 'click-click-done' management interfaces but the power and the engine-room access for deep configuration that Hitachi Vantara gives make it worth the extra effort to run some of the absolute most rock-solid and fastest/faster storage systems available.
