Foglight for Virtualization - A Year in Review

Wow! What a year and what a way to wrap it up. Foglight for Virtualization 8.7.5 is out and with it brings a brand new SaaS offering from Quest that enables connectivity from any Foglight for Virtualization installation in the world to the cloud. Try it at dataprotection.quest.com. It’s the beginning of something big and I can’t wait to share with everyone what’s next.

But before I do that, let’s talk a little about what 2017 meant to Quest and our users. 2017 was a huge year for Quest. After our divestiture from Dell, we hit the ground running and took off into a sprint! We wanted to ensure that our users were at the front of the pack, positioned to make their businesses successful against their peers. To do this, we became hyper-focused on Microsoft platforms, traditional and emerging databases, BYOD and managed devices, as well as the hybrid cloud. Each of our focus areas saw the launch of cloud services, including Quest on Demand, Toad Edge and the expansion of Spotlight Essentials, KACE Cloud, and the Quest Data Protection Portal. We also released major versions across our entire portfolio – Foglight Databases added support for 5 new database platforms!! All of this happened because we believe that we are here to innovate with you, our users, and make your life simple. 

During 2017 we continued to build out Foglight for Virtualization to make it easier to use, provide more hybrid cloud functionality and delver on what our users asked for, we added:

• Foglight Hybrid Cloud Manager for Azure and AWS 
• Virtual Machine Cloud Migration Analytics that places VMs in the best cloud IaaS instance/tier available. Based on real performance metrics over a 90 day period, not what the VM is allocated and not a one-time data collection.  
• Quest VROOM, (FVE and RR), the new definition of virtualization management
• Integration with NinjaRMM Network Monitoring, this means we have firewall, switch and router information that includes netflow on every port coupled with a SaaS interface. 
• Storage Spaces Direct to complete our support form VMware and Hyper-V hyperconverged infrastructure. we have had vSAN for almost 2 years.
• Cloud integration, the Data Protection Portal http://dataprotection.quest.com  
• The ability to monitor any Storage Array that supports SMI-S, on top of existing support from EMC, HP, Hitachi, NetApp and Dell
• Foglight APIs for inbound/outbound integrations, 
• New simplified UI 
• What-if capacity management with automation across Hyper-V and VMware, We build the VMs so you don't have too. 

What does all of this look like? 

Foglight for Virtualization Cloud - http://dataprotection.quest.com

Brand new and improving every two weeks the Foglight for Virtualization Cloud Connection is available to all Foglight users with active support with Quest. The initial release is being built out to allow at-a-glance views of the health of your Foglight infrastructure and active alarms.

Heatmap Based Analytics.

Pivot metrics, color severity and drill down to view impacted objects. Foglight for virtualization now has Heatmaps and Scatter plots to make analyzing and understanding VMware and Hyper-V performance easier than ever. 

Scatter Plot Analysis

Datacenter Insights

Large and small environments have the same demands and the same performance problems. So we have made it incredibly simple to find common issues in your environment. Datacenter Insights collates all of the frequently asked questions about VMware, Hyper-v, Storage Arrays and Physical Infrastructure into single location to make finding and preventing issues fast.  

Foglight Hybrid Cloud manager for Azure and AWS

Foglight's Hybrid Cloud Manager enables IaaS monitoring across Azure and AWS without the need for manual configuration, without the hazards of missing elastic/burst workload changes and consolidates datacenter and cloud performance troubleshooting into a single platform. 

Hyper-V 'What-if' Capacity and Performance Tuning

Quest released Capacity Director with VMware support in October 2016, thorough 2017 we have added cluster performance tuning as well as Hyper-V support. Capacity Director now allows you to understand natural growth in your environment, model planned changes, understand the impact of changes and tune the performance of virtual machines between and within clusters by right-sizing or moving virtual machines. 

Environment Overview with VROOM

In our latest release, Foglight for Virtualization 8.7.5 we have made the environment overview significantly more interactive; now, every link drills down to reveal the issues in your environment.

Cloud Migration Analytics

New to Capacity Director in September 2017, Foglight for Virtualization now analyzes the compute your virtual machines actually consume and finds the best IaaS offering available in the market supported by performance risk analytics. Built so you will know the cost before you migrate and so that you know there will not be an impact on the performance of your virtual machines.

Storage Spaces Direct 

Over the past year we have been adding in support of Storage Spaces Direct. Foglight for Virtualization now supports monitoring Hyper-V VMs on Storage Spaces Direct in-context with the performance of the Storage Spaces Direct infrastructure.

Ninja Network Monitoring Integration

Knowing that your virtual environment is performing, available and protected is only part of the datacenter infrastructure, That is why we partnered with NinjaRMM to integrate their SaaS network monitoring platform with Foglight for Virtualization. Now you can see Firewalls, Routers and Switches in-context with your Hybrid Datacenter

2018 is going to be an exciting year with several on-premises and cloud releases planned. We are working hard to keep our users ahead of the curve and leading the industry with new, proactive, hybrid cloud analytics. All being built so you can fully leverage cloud infrastructure and services without breaking your budget constraints.