Saving Money with Foglight: Part 1 - Vendor Consolidation through Centralized Monitoring

Far too often, organizations look at monitoring solutions as "nice to have", or better put, as luxury items that make the lives of IT administrators easier, but come at a cost. This series will look at ways that organizations have saved money off of their IT budgets, by bringing Foglight into their environment.  The first post in this multi-part series will focus on consolidating an organizations cross platform database monitoring under a single solution: Foglight for Databases.

Many years ago, it was common that IT organizations had a small number of strategic/standard database platforms.  We'd frequently hear "We are an Oracle shop" or "We've standardized on SQL Server, with a small handful of less critical systems on MySQL".  Over the past several years, for a variety of reasons, companies now have to manage a much more diverse set of databases, both in the database platforms that they use (SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, DB2, MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, etc...), and the technologies that they run those databases on (VM's on prem and cloud hosted, platform as a service, containers, serverless, etc...).  As each of these platforms grow in criticality within an organization, there comes a need to provide proactive monitoring and diagnostics to the administrative staff.  Some customers solve this problem by acquiring point solutions for each database technology that they use in their environment.  For example, they might use one tool for Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Enterprise Manager/Cloud Control for Oracle, native AWS tools for cloud hosted systems, and another third party tool for MySQL.  Not only does this lead to an inefficiency in how customers manage their environments due to the differences in functionality and workflows when managing separate platforms, it can also lead to an unnecessarily expensive monitoring infrastructure.  When an organization runs five separate monitoring solutions, to monitor and manage five separate database platforms, they need to negotiate five separate vendor contracts without the power of scale to help them negotiate for a better price.  Not only is the up front cost often more costly, the ongoing maintenance contracts can spiral out of control, given that they have five separate maintenance contracts, each with uplift, and differing terms and conditions.  Lastly, five separate monitoring tools, means five separate monitoring infrastructures in place, each with their own virtual machines, repositories, storage, and interfaces.  

Foglight for Databases offers deep coverage of most leading database platforms, including (but not limited to):