Foglight vs. Cloud Monitoring

Hello, everybody. This is Gordon Cornelius at Quest Software. And with me today is Ben Boise, one of our solutions consultants who's been working with Foglight for the better part of 10 years. And Ben, today had a customer talk with me and they said, you know, Gordon, I've transferred my entire database environment into the cloud. All the workloads are up there. And you know, cloud vendor that we're working with, they have some native monitoring that they offer. And really, I need to help justify why we should look at Foglight to offer some more advanced visibility than what's out there currently. I know that you've been working with Foglight for quite some time. What comes to mind when you hear that? Yeah. And it is a really challenging conversation, right? Because a lot of these cloud vendors have advertised themselves as sort of fire and forget, if you will. Oh, you could just move that workload up to the cloud. You know, no worries. And oh, if you if you start to notice any performance-related issues, you can very easily throw more hardware at it-- more memory, more CPU, better storage. And so they're more than happy to have you spend more money with them. And so as a result, a lot of times, the types of metrics that they'll provide to you natively, and at either the free tier, or very low cost tier, are really quite minimal. Now, the reality of those environments is they do provide mechanisms where you can leverage and extend their functionality. But that largely, then, becomes a, well, I have to do it scenario. And really what we're what we're exploring here is this whole buy versus build. Well, can I build it is, well, probably. How long is that going to take? What additional expenses are you going to incur, that you know about, in that particular cloud environment? And then, is this really something that you want your developers or your DBAs to be spending time doing, which then subtracts away from the projects that maybe your business really needs to complete. So that whole build versus buy starts to come into play. The other thing is around the depth of data that is presented. From a very high level perspective, CPU memory, maybe some high-level transaction information can be pulled from these native providers fairly easily. But a lot of them, out of the box, are only giving you what's happening right now, or within the past 60 minutes, or something along those lines. The nice thing about Foglight is, we keep very, very rich history. Depending on the metrics themselves, they could be anywhere from 90 days to 2 years. So the ability to very quickly pinpoint a point in time that I wish to examine-- maybe it's the last four hours. Maybe it's not the last four hours. Maybe it's four hours, some other period of time. And then, being able to understand that workload, understand it with regards to the resources that are being consumed. Where is that particular workload waiting? What aspects of that workload are impacting the environment? As an example, do I have a database or databases that are busier than others during this time frame? And the ability to drill in very, very granularly, and ask questions-- oh, I've identified several SQL statements that are negatively impacting the demo database against this specific instance. And the ability to grab that and understand those items very, very quickly is really something that Foglight does very, very well. And not only that, as enterprises start to expand, they're building into additional database platforms that maybe the folks that are supporting these environments don't fully understand. Well, not only do I have to do this, maybe, for a platform that I do understand, but now I've got to do it for a platform that I don't understand. And we're going back into a buy versus build mentality. What if I could have these done for me out, of the box? I can stand it up very, very easily. It's taking care of the-- not only the data collections, but it's also taking care of storing that data, of turning that raw data into information about those particular workloads. And that's available to me out of the box. Yeah, certainly. And you know, I think really it's about optimizing what you have, so you're not constantly adding to that cloud bill by throwing more resources, vCPUs against an issue where, maybe, optimal tuning could resolve that. And then also, we discussed the data retention, having much longer data retention within the solution. And then lastly, there is something to say about the static licensing of Foglight, where you just license for the instance. You can make as many calls against that instance, versus some of the cloud vendors, where anytime you're pulling information against those resources that could be an additional charge for each time you do that. It's a lot of hidden costs there that, unfortunately, we find out about when it comes time to pay that bill. Absolutely. Well, hey, Ben, thank you for your time. And if this piqued your interest, and you'd like to have a longer discussion, feel free to reach out to us. We're happy to host. Have a great day.