TrustRadius Insights for Foglight are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Great Visual Dashboard: Users have found Quest foglight to offer a visually appealing and intuitive dashboard for their datacenter. Several reviewers have mentioned that the visual representation of data makes it easy to solve performance event correlation.
Wide Range of Functionalities: The availability of optional cartridges such as SQL, Oracle, and ESXi has been highly appreciated by users. This enhancement allows for everything to be managed in the same console, providing convenience and efficiency for managing different platforms.
Real-time Data Display: Reviewers have highlighted the valuable feature of real-time data display in the interface. Being able to see the latest information instantaneously helps users stay informed about their system's performance and make timely decisions.
Foglight is a monitoring and optimization solution that provides performance monitoring and diagnostic capabilities in virtual machines and cloud offerings, reducing the risks of the hybrid cloud strategy, it is a tool that helps to migrate workloads running optimally. and reducing risks, It is used to keep the business running, Foglight's capabilities extend to hybrid environments providing a comprehensive performance solution.
Pros
It helps IT teams overcome the dual challenges of disparate technical infrastructures and limited experience with multiple database and vitalization platforms.
Cons
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.
<ul><li>[Foglight is] used to monitor virtualized environment (VMware) Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server w/ Analytics and other physical servers and software subsystems.</li></ul><ul><li>The problems it solves for are active monitoring and alerting (uptime monitoring), historical baseline and trending, surfacing changes to hardware/software, log aggregation and analysis.</li></ul>
Pros
Graphing and visualization of complex data sets
Historical baselining and trending
Automation of common tasks for response to known issues
Aggregation and correlation of data across time series
Cons
Threshold limits for alerting are not easily set to custom instances or groupings (things like customizing free disk space alerts for systems with enormous volumes to alert at a different threshold % than those with smaller volumes)
Groovy requires a learning curve/specialized skill set for modifying rule sets
Quest (perhaps as a victim of being purchased and then subsequently sold off by Dell) has deprecated a number of the subsystem cartridges (Storage etc.) that we depended upon including the lowest common denominator one (snmp) that is used to create monitors around proprietary systems and hardware that has no other api/monitoring capability
Support has in past taken *months* to get an answer to issues that they had already solved for under another cartridge (e.g. disabling of SMB v1 caused their Exchange cartridge to have monitoring failures - they corrected this. Odd issues with another cartridge took literally 6 months to figure out that these were related to the disabling of SMB v1 as well. This was very frustrating.
Other products offer more advanced analytics so it seems they have been falling behind. If this were a very inexpensive product I would not fault this but the licensing for Foglight is not inexpensive.
Likelihood to Recommend
<b>Strengths [Foglight]</b>
<ul><li>Monitoring, Alerting and Management of on-prem virtualization and physical servers</li><li>Historical trending and baselining are excellent and being able to compare a problem period against the same sets of data for a period when there was no issue is especially helpful as part of troubleshooting.</li><li>Ease of use for end users is appreciated</li></ul><div><b>Weaknesses [of Foglight]</b></div><div><ul><li>Creation and management of custom monitors is a developer level activity requiring Groovy skillset</li><li>Less useful for management of an environment where there is a large amount of custom implementations</li><li>Commitment to longevity of cartridges/packs for specific subsystems</li><li>Ability to create custom schedules/alerts/escalations is only available via a 3rd party product (from a former Quest developer) and is not particularly easy to manage/manipulate</li><li>Lack of API accessibility for external integrations to other analytics (splunk, etc.)
</li></ul></div>
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)
For the past 5 years, Foglight has been used across several teams in our organization, to include primarily our Infrastructure and Operations department and Business Applications teams. Only recently have we started to migrate away from Foglight for more advanced tools in the APM space. At the moment, we still heavily rely on Foglight for Database monitoring and management. It excels at Database monitoring. We have not found another tool that can compete with that functionality.
Pros
Database monitoring
Database management suite
Customization (both monitors and dashboards)
Cons
GUI interface is difficult to navigate
No APM capabilities. They left this space about a year ago
We have had issues with the GUI response times. On a regular basis, the interface can take several minutes to refresh
Likelihood to Recommend
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 is used by our IT and Lit Support departments to manage in-house internal software, applications, documents review and production platforms, and hosted applications/files as well. It is used to monitor performance across all systems and platforms such that issues are easily prevented or combatted and do not lead to interruptions in productivity, particularly in the areas of document review, coding, and production.
Pros
Integration with platforms
Uniformity
Pinpointing of issues
Cons
There are not many problems with this product
Limited ability to use Foglight itself to solve problems it identifies
Likelihood to Recommend
Foglight is particularly helpful when you have multiple platforms, software solutions, or applications running across a variety of networks. It allows users to pinpoint potential problems across these fields and combat them to minimize disruption to the technology itself. The alerts are generally almost instantaneous which allows swift responses and low business interruption.
Foglight is being used in our company to help our IS department to monitor our applications and infrastructure. It helps us to address from End User issues, application, vmware and database. It also help us to quickly be notified through integration with xMatters on important issues happening in our environment.
Pros
VMWare Monitoring
Custom use of scripts and dashboard
Performance Analysis for Database
Remote Monitoring for Linux and Windows.
Cons
A common complaint I hear from our users is that it has a confusing UI.
For End User monitoring it requires a good time troubleshooting "network issues", creating the right filters and make sure you are receiving the right information which sometimes is not straight forward to figure out.
Had issues in the past for Foglight firing false alarms monitoring Weblogic Application Servers, it required a lot of customization to adjust those metrics. Although those are no longer a issue with their latest release of the cartridge for application servers.
Likelihood to Recommend
Foglight brought us a great value monitoring our Linux vmWare environment, very easy to use and implement and valuable script customization to integrate with our notification tool.
