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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Symantec Server Management Suite
Score 7.0 out of 10
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The Symantec Server Management Suite is an option for automating the management of servers and deployments.
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.
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 SMP solution is a beast. Each piece is complicated in itself let alone how everything ties together!
There is plenty of documentation online on how to perform a specific task, but you need to pay attention to what VERSION the article is written for. I've been halfway through implementing something only to hit a roadblock since I'm running a newer version and the option the article says to click on doesn't exist anymore...
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.
I have had exposure to SCCM before we moved to Altiris (aka SMP) and SMP does some things in a more complicated way, but there is a LOT of flexibility too. For example, with Patch Management, it's very similar to SCCM, you download the patches you want to install and then publish them. However, with SCCM, you need to have WSUS running on the back end to handle the patch deployment, while SMP does the installs itself. It syncs the patches with the agents and stages the files, and will install them when the maintenance window opens.
Being able to report on the majority of things you want all from one interface, makes it really easy to get the results you want.
Because my employer didn't provide training, it took working with support, reading technical documentation, and just playing around on my own to learn how to do certain things.
I've had a lot of help from the SMP Support staff and they're great people and very helpful!
