Fortune 500 company monitors cross-platform database performance with Foglight

Benefícios

• Cuts issue resolution time from hours to just minutes
• Saves money by eliminating the need for multiple monitoring tools
• Increases visibility through a unified dashboard that monitors all their diverse platforms
• Provides flexibility to adopt new database platforms
• Increases productivity, giving IT staff more time to grow valuable skills and innovate

A história

About the customer…

As a Fortune 500 company specializing in aerospace automation, performance materials and technologies as well as safety and productivity solutions, the global conglomerate maintains a vast and complex IT infrastructure. With more than 4,000 databases around the world, including Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, PostgreSQL and more, they needed an easier way to manage performance across all their diverse platforms.

Limited monitoring capabilities create challenges

Initially, the company relied on an enterprise-wide server-level monitoring tool. But without a database-centric solution, they couldn’t dive deep into database performance to diagnose issues. Knowing they needed more extensive insights, they tried three or four additional tools, but none delivered the range of capabilities they sought. After looking further for an offering that would provide real-time database monitoring and alerting, they selected Quest® Foglight® for Databases.

By choosing Foglight, the company gained unprecedented visibility across all their database platforms. From one simple-to-use console, they can quickly diagnose and resolve emerging issues to ensure database high availability and prevent business interruptions.

Saving time and increasing productivity

The company can now automatically identify, prioritize and resolve issues quickly. “We created a live dashboard using Foglight and everything is generated automatically,” said their senior director of IT. “We use Foglight for monitoring on a real-time basis and also to create alerts on a real-time basis if there’s an issue. We can quickly see if there is a big problem, like a priority one or priority two.”

Problems that may have taken hours to manually investigate in the past now take far less time to understand and fix, as the team uses powerful monitoring capabilities to pinpoint the root cause of an issue. “Suppose it takes four hours to resolve an issue, with Foglight, it could be 10 or 15 minutes,” he said.

And that time saved on manual processes is being put to good use. “With Foglight, you’re gaining bandwidth,” he explained. “With that extra bandwidth, I actually cross-trained people to learn more technologies they can support. I don’t need to bring in somebody from outside.”

By adding Foglight to their monitoring strategy, he’s made his team not only more productive, but also more knowledgeable. Instead of spending time reacting to problems, they can now quickly and proactively resolve issues, gaining more time to grow their skills and better support the company.

Visibility across all platforms – in one screen

The company further increased productivity while reducing licensing costs by enabling IT staff to use a single solution to monitor all their on-premises and cloud database platforms. Now, they can drill down to get performance insights into SQL Server, MongoDB and all the other platforms they use, as well as the ones they’ll adopt in the future. Having the flexibility to introduce new database platforms like Snowflake without needing to purchase additional monitoring tools and train staff on those will continue to benefit the company going forward.

And for each of those platforms, the company can count on Foglight to provide alerts for deviations from normal metrics, deep diagnostics and alarm data viewable from any drilldown screen as well as custom views and reporting through DBA, manager and executive dashboards. They can also narrow the scope of analysis and quickly pinpoint slow-running queries, making it easy to continue maintaining peak performance across all their databases.

Looking to the future

The company is excited about the way they’ve transformed their database management approach with a robust, scalable and efficient solution for real-time monitoring and diagnostics. The partnership between the company and Quest continues to evolve, promising further enhancements and innovations in database performance monitoring.