Foglight vs. Enterprise-Wide Monitoring

Hello. This is Gordon Cornelius with Quest software. With me today I have Ben Boyce, one of the solutions consultants, specializing in database performance. And Ben, you know I was having a conversation with a customer today, and he said, "You know, can you really just give me the value add that Foglight could give us, versus more of an enterprise wide monitor." And I thought making a video like this would be a fun way to pass along that information rather than sending some blog post or data sheet or something of that nature. For sure, yeah. Yeah. So you've been working with Foglight for over 10 years. When you speak with a customer that comes with that concern, what do you gravitate to? Yeah, and it's interesting because when somebody already has a monitoring solution in place, I always ask them, "Well, why are you talking to me?" Right? What seems to be missing from your existing solution, and would probably argue 90% of the time it's that that existing solution really doesn't have a database's emphasis. So while it might provide some high level metrics, is it up, is it down, that's really the only insight that they're getting. And so the benefit that Foglight has is really, number one, starting with its breadth of coverage. You can see each one of these little tiles represents a platform that you can monitor with Foglight. This is by no means the complete list of database platforms that we can monitor. But you'll also notice it does a great job of really summarizing what's happening across the entire enterprise, through the use of like a traffic signal, green being good, red being bad. And then across the spectrum there, different severities of alarms have different colors associated with them. And so not only can I very quickly understand where in my enterprise, from the perspective of maybe the database platform in particular, but also really the platforms that are experiencing perhaps the most fatal issues. Do I have instances that are down in my environment? And I can do that very, very quickly just navigating through the home page. But it doesn't really stop there. The important thing is, well, how do I drill in a bit further and really understand what's going on with the workload itself? Is this workload typical for this time of day? Or is it is it atypical? Let me find out what's going on with regards to the resources that are being used. There are certain weight conditions that need to be mindful of. I may need to slice and dice that particular workload, better understanding what programs are hitting the instance that could be contributing to these performance problems, or what database within this particular instance could be problematic, drill into that database. Better understand those SQL statements that are hitting that environment, and in this particular case I can very quickly drill down to the problematic SQL statement. Now the important thing to understand here is not only can I look at things in near real time, but I have the ability to go back in time. So having that historical context. Maybe I'm not reacting to an issue right now. Maybe it's some time in the past that I need to investigate. Or could there perhaps be changes to my environment that could be contributing to these problems? Give myself that other dynamic or that other understanding of what else is going on in the environment to really help me isolate and troubleshoot and perform that sort of root cause analysis. So in addition to that sort of breadth of coverage that we have here, we have the ability to dive in very, very quickly, very easily, very, very deeply across our enterprise. Yeah, certainly. And I also think Foglight's ability to integrate with many of these solutions out there really pays dividends because it does allow you to really dive deep into a certain layer of your environment, and then report back to something that's more centralized. And ultimately another consideration is a buy versus build mentality. Absolutely. Yeah, if you have to build out these environments where sometimes they will use customization, professional services, maybe their own proprietary scripting language where you have to put in these commands to pull information out, just to get this level of granularity, but then you obviously won't have the same type of user interface that we have with here. So that's really where we play in this space, and if you're interested in learning a little more, feel free to reach out. We're happy to have an extended conversation.