Foglight vs. IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server

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.

Incentivized

If you have several SQL servers and don't have a lot of time or resources to constantly monitor them, SQLdm will be very helpful. For one or two servers, it might be overkill. All of our servers are virtual, so having a tool that can monitor host metrics as well as guest metrics is a plus as well.

Incentivized

• VMWare Monitoring
• Custom use of scripts and dashboard
• Performance Analysis for Database
• Remote Monitoring for Linux and Windows.

Incentivized

• SQL Server Monitoring
• Alerts
• Diagnostics

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• While there is reporting present in the app, I don't find it to be very configurable. I eventually pointed our reporting software at the SQLdm database so I could craft my own reporting. The reporting that's there is sufficient for a lot of things, but for more detailed analysis and trending, it's a little light
• The config right out of the box feels a little heavy to me. It leans towards the side of over monitoring and over notifying. For example, I view "critical" alerts as those that I'd want to be woken up at 3am for. After a fresh install, I felt like I was getting so many "critical" alerts that I was starting to ignore them. I had to spend a good bit of time tweaking.
• Sometimes the interface seems laggy. Switching between individual servers and switching screens can take what feels like a long time. I'm not sure if it's the way I have the client configured or something up with my machine, but this app in particular feels slower than it should.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL, Redgate SQL, and MonitorLogicMonitor are similar products to each other. We decided on IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL because our experience with locating heavy queries has been very good and it provides real-time monitoring of all servers and databases. It also allows you to have a large volume of historical data which allows you to analyze trends in the databases.

Incentivized

• Positive - near instant alerts help combat potential problems quickly
• Positive - minimizes business interruption
• Positive - limits disruptions to productivity

Incentivized

• Quickly identify issues around deadlocks and blocking. Quickly allowing for resolution
• Quickly and easily enable automation around issues so we can reduce the amount of time it takes for resolution of issues
• Having built-in tools to view things such as index fragmentation--allows you to quickly find correlations in performance issues

Incentivized