Foglight vs. Third Party Database Monitoring

Hi. This is Gordon Cornelius. And with me today is Ben Boise. He is one of the systems consultants we have here at Quest, who specializes in our database performance monitoring solutions. And Ben, I was speaking with a customer today. And he said, you know what, Gordon, we already use a third party specific to understanding performance and diagnosing issues within our database environment. But really, what separates Foglight from the rest of the market, and I know that you and I have been working with this product over 10 years, and really happy just to explain where we sit-in the market. So, Ben, when you hear this, what comes to mind for you? Yeah. There's a couple of things that come to mind. Number one is really kind of the makeup of the team that's tasked with supporting these environments. And in fact, one of my favorite conversations, I had a database team manager tell me, he says, Ben, I've got I've got a SQL server team. And I've got an Oracle team. And I've got a MySQL team. And the guy actually told me, he's like, I can't afford it. What I need is a database team. And so what we're starting to see in a lot of organizations are folks that may be traditional, let's say, I'm an Oracle DBA, or a SQL server DBA. And as far as the organization is concerned, they say, well, you're a database person. So, congratulations. We need you to take over the Oracle platform or the MySQL platform. And so having that breadth of coverage that Foglight offers is really critical to those organizations. I'm coming into this, maybe I'm an Oracle person. I don't know what's happening in SQL server. I can very quickly find out what SQL server instances are critical to my organization. And more importantly, I can see you know what's actually happening across those individual instances. Are we reacting to an alarm specifically, where we need to understand, OK, are there some backups that are actually missing in this environment? Is this something that we need to dive into more deeply? Or maybe we just get that question of, hey, is there something going on with the database? And we don't really know where to begin. And so if we take a look at this same sort of connection, I can very quickly get a sense of, is the activity atypical for the time frame? In other words, am I seeing this sort of peak in the environment? Or is it typical for this time frame? And so we can drill in very, very quickly and start to really ask very, very deep questions about those workloads. So in addition to sort of the breadth of coverage that's becoming more and more important to these people, it's the ability to roll up our sleeves and dive more deeply into either platforms that we are familiar with, or more importantly, platforms that, maybe that we're not familiar with. Something else that comes into play is really how Foglight is architected compared to those third party solutions. I've been told the customer is saying, well, gosh, we're dealing with complex, maybe geographically dispersed data centers. Or we have Windows domains that separate where these instances live. And fortunately, with Foglight, we have a very, very flexible architecture, so that Foglight itself can be deployed across multiple domains. It can be deployed across multiple geographically dispersed data centers, so that those data collections are happening very close to the instances that are most important to us. And I would also comment, the nice thing about that is you're talking about different users, different things of that nature. Foglight also is a web-based solution. It has a web console. So with that being said, you're able to customize your dashboards, customize the views, customize the roles certain individuals have. That way, they can digest the information that's important to them. It's not a thick client that resides on your desktop that's very static with the views that you can have. Lastly, Quest does pride itself on our award-winning support. And that's always a consideration to have when picking a vendor. Absolutely. Well, hey, Ben, thanks for touching on some of the highlights. And certainly, if you're watching this video and you'd like to learn more, we're happy to have a longer, more in depth conversation with you thank you.