The recent system glitch at Toyota offers a compelling lesson in the intricate dance between technology and business. When routine database maintenance went awry, the fallout was massive, halting 28 assembly lines across 14 plants. Over a span of 36 hours…
Auditing an application of its users’ activities can be useful and at times a mandatory task in tightly-secured environments. Spotlight has many robust capabilities such as deleting or disabling connections to changing alarm threshold values or stopping…
The container world is developing very fast. Now container technology is making its way into the enterprise data environment and it can be deployed onto both production and support infrastructure. Thus it might be the architecture for the next generation…
Maintaining a cross-platform database environment has been common for twenty years or more. For all kinds of business or technical reasons, companies leverage different database types including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, IBM DB2 LUW, SAP Sybase, and…
Many of our Foglight users including myself have grown accustomed to using the "Databases" home as their starting point into their daily monitoring tasks. This dashboard provides a global view into all of the instances being monitored and gives…
The proliferation of web hosting alternatives and client side execution of code within web browsers has moved APM vendors to take a much harder look at collecting data from within the browser using JavaScript instrumentation. While sniffing the wire to…
A colleague of mine (Darren Mallette) wrote a great blog post explaining how to query the embedded Foglight Performance Investigator (PI) repository using tools which provide native PostgreSQL connectivity (i.e. Toad Data Point or pgAdmin). While reading…
Often times, we will have a situation where we don't want a Rule to alert on a specific host or set of hosts which are brought down for a reason, but we still want the rule to alert for the rest of the servers.
This can be achieved in multiple ways…
SQL Performance Investigator (SQL-PI) is an extension to the standard Foglight for SQL Server Cartridge, and adds Real-time and historical data.
If you have used Performance Analysis for SQL Server, then SQL Performance Investigator should look very familiar…
Can Foglight run on a Raspberry Pi running Linux? This blog answers the question.
Interestingly, I've been asked more than once recently if the Foglight Agent Manager can be installed on a Raspberry Pi (version 3) running Raspbian. One of the main use…
We often get questions from customers wondering how much overhead will be put on a database server when monitoring that server with Foglight for SQL Server and/or Foglight for Oracle. This blog post should act to explain exactly how Foglight collects…
Friends. Change is here. All of us DBAs are dealing with it. Look at the number of new database platforms. It’s relentless. They just keep coming. And we’re expected to take on any or all of them that’ll save our companies money. But it’s hard, right…
Foglight for Databases had an amazing year, with several releases for the various Database Cartridges. Here are some of the highlights of what we’ve done in 2017:
When reporting a Foglight connectivity issue, support people are always asking to test the connection using Telnet or Putty. But what to do if you do not have Telnet or Putty installed?
There are some other options, for example using an Internet browser…
“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change “- Heraclitus.
Development, new applications, upgrades, patches, maintenance, schema updates…the list goes on and on around ways that changes are introduced into your environment. Sometimes these…
A common question is how to make an exception for 1 or 2 particular databases for certain rules in Foglight. A good example is the "days since last backup" rule for SQL Server. The global default applies to all databases. It's possible from the Databases…
Investigating a rogue OS process is a pain; digging through the multitude of metrics, different times of days have different outcomes, alarms that come and go and customer complaints to accompany it all. This is just one example of problem troubleshooting…
This post will cover one way to make it easy easier to get the user-defined collection data onto a dashboard or report.
For a quick refresher, please see User Defined Collections in Foglight for SQL Server: A Quick Walk-Through
With a "simple" UDC that…
You say “No” - well - I say “Yes”. All database rules are sensitive and have a sensitivity level.
What does that mean? What is a sensitivity level? Where can I find it and can it be modified?
Ok - a lot of questions, so let's start…
DBAs are all kinds of awesome. We’re smart. Stylish. Capable of administering databases! Who else can say that? Yeah. Just DBAs. Our technical wizardry is second to none.
Because we’re awesome.
And guess what today is. It’s our day. That…
In every SQL Server instance the TempDB database is the common global resource for all the operations taking place and DBA's are particularly cautious about the use of it. Given the nature of applications and ad-hoc queries by users, one must keep…
This post is short but hopefully useful. When you start the Foglight server and navigate to the home page URL (http://foglight_server:8080 or https://foglight_server:8443), you may see a startup splash page (below). If you see a login page, then the Foglight…
Woohoo! Just got word that my boss approved my January vacation and now I’ll get the opportunity to check several items off my bucket list as I hop across country to the Quest Database Fed Forum in DC on February 20th.
On my First stop I will…
If you’re like many DBAs, your life is probably getting more complicated by the week. Are you under pressure to manage larger and larger numbers of database instances? Or to adopt new database technologies like open source or NoSQL? With those changes…
Many customers ask how they might integrate Foglight Alarms into other 3rd party monitoring tools. One way to accomplish this is to send SNMP traps in response to a Foglight alarm.
To configure Foglight for this capability, you need to first download…
