Announcing Quest®︎ Foglight®︎ v6.1 General Availability

Background

We are excited to announce the general availability of Quest® Foglight® version 6.1.

Foglight is the broadest, deepest database and infrastructure monitoring solution available with a long track record of helping organizations of all sizes and all industries manage performance and infrastructure costs. Foglight brings unique top-to-bottom infrastructure monitoring and optimization capabilities for your hybrid IT stack including databases, cloud infrastructure, operating systems, hypervisors, containers and more.

What’s new in version 6.1?

Alarm email notification configuration facility

Managing alarm configurations in complex hybrid infrastructures is a challenging task.

In heterogenous environments, you usually find yourself working with multiple wizards and different tools to configure alarm settings and templates. This usually results in an inconsistent user experience which makes alarm management a difficult task for IT professionals. The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. With version 6.0, we introduced a simplified approach for managing alarm configurations across multiple targets using alarm templates.

Adding to the alarm template functionality, which controls alarm threshold settings across all your monitored domains from one central place, Foglight 6.1 brings the ability to create “notification channels” such as email addresses that are eligible to receive email notifications when selected alarms fire. Again, as with alarm templates, a central facility to configure all email notifications is a powerful way to simplify and organize who gets notified of each alarm when problems arise in your environment.

MySQL Performance Investigator (PI) execution plan analysis

Performance Investigator (PI) is one of Foglight’s most popular features. PI offers multidimensional analysis which brings deep visibility into the most complex database performance challenges. Multidimensional analysis enables users to drill down, slice and dice workload performance data and gain visibility into performance bottlenecks. For example, a user can easily drill into a list of the top users and see SQL statements for individual users. Or, SQL Statements can be investigated on their own, regardless of user or any other details of where it came from or who executed it.

Foglight 6.0 introduced MySQL PI, and we are happy to announce a key improvement with this release – MySQL Execution Plan Analysis. Viewing the details of the SQL execution plan is an important part of solving performance problems, once potentially problematic SQL statements are identified. Now it is possible to view the execution plan details for any selected MySQL SQL statement without leaving the investigations being conducted in PI. Whether your goals are reducing computing costs or improving execution time, a statement’s execution plan can lead the developer or DBA to make the right decisions about index changes or statement syntax restructuring. 

gMSA Support

Security is top of mind today, whether you manage a database or infrastructure.  A popular mechanism for simplifying security administration, while simultaneously strengthening it, is the group managed service account (gMSA). Foglight now supports the use of gMSA accounts for SQL Server and Windows connections for which your organization has configured gMSA. This includes gMSA configured connections to the SQL Server Foglight Performance Investigator repository instance. So, for SQL Server and Windows monitoring connections, you no longer need to manage credentials and change/cycle passwords within the Foglight product if those connected services are set up for gMSA.

Framework usability enhancements

We also continue the improvement of the general framework usability. In release 6.0, we simplified the navigation bar and added a smart, free-text search box with autocomplete so you can quickly and easily access performance data for any monitored target in your hybrid environment. Now in release 6.1, new improvements include an intuitive button for bookmarking any dashboard, and simplified pinning and resizing of the left-side navigation panel. The visible selections in the navigation panel can now be easily edited to suit your interests. This enables you to focus in on the Foglight domains or administrative functions that you need to see.  Additionally, a new login page welcomes you to the UI and alarm management functions are now conveniently grouped for easy access under a single navigation panel option. We are sure that you’ll appreciate the new user experience whether you are a new or veteran Foglight user.

Summary

Foglight version 6.1 introduces major product enhancements in various aspects:

• Domain
  • MySQL Execution Plan Analysis in Performance Investigator (PI)
• Usability
  • Modernized cross-platform alarm notification configuration facility
  • gMSA support
  • Framework usability improvements 

For more information about Foglight, please visit https://www.quest.com/foglight.