Avocent Data Center Planner, from Vertiv (formerly Emerson Network Power) is software solution providing a visual infrastructure planning and management tool within Vertiv’s strategic framework for data center optimization. Data Center Planner is designed to provide accurate and complete information about device and equipment locations, as well as current capacities and projected growth.
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Foglight
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Foglight is a database performance management suite from Quest, with modules to perform cloud analytics, network performance monitoring and virtualization management, scaling to a broad, cloud / virtualization focused IT infrastructure monitoring solution.
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Rocket Servergraph
Score 9.8 out of 10
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Rocket Servergraph enables users to automate daily backups and get prioritized real-time alerts on server capacity across data environments. The vendor emphasizes Servergraph’s ability to simplify audit and compliance reporting, including customizable reporting by geography, application, etc.
Avocent Data Center Planner is well suited in helping us to capacity plan our data center, increase operations efficiency and keep track of available patch and switch ports. We are able to visually view wherein our data centers are underutilized and more importantly over-utilized. We can also follow the path of the cross-connects from one object to another visually providing us another troubleshooting tool in our datacenter. Previously we had Excel spreadsheets with this information and it's can be confusing to follow compared to a visual representation that Avocent Data Center Planner provides.
Monitoring, Alerting and Management of on-prem virtualization and physical servers
Historical trending and baselining are excellent and being able to compare a problem period against the same sets of data for a period when there was no issue is especially helpful as part of troubleshooting.
Ease of use for end users is appreciated
Weaknesses [of Foglight]
Creation and management of custom monitors is a developer level activity requiring Groovy skillset
Less useful for management of an environment where there is a large amount of custom implementations
Commitment to longevity of cartridges/packs for specific subsystems
Ability to create custom schedules/alerts/escalations is only available via a 3rd party product (from a former Quest developer) and is not particularly easy to manage/manipulate
Lack of API accessibility for external integrations to other analytics (splunk, etc.)
Data storage and provision of reliable backup plan is part of great services provided by this great product. It is the central reporting system that shows storage units and controls the data metrics that runs across our organization. It gives us the basic planning workbase for monitoring data pathways and performance details of our organization.
Avocent Data Center Planner gave us an overview of our data center without the need to be physically there to perform an audit.
We can visually map out and trace the cross-connect a device or server is using without a need of remote hands to trace the cable.
It provides us the ability to capacity plan our data center. Giving us the ability to see what space is under or over-utilized and formulate a plan to adjust to correct it.
The library of objects we can use in Avocent Data Center Planner needs to be expanded. There are times the server object we need is not available in the library.
A more efficient way to connect objects together. It's way too easy to delete a connection mapping, a dialogue box asking if the connection should be deleted would be nice. I've accidentally deleted a connection before and it's annoying that I need to redo it.
The ability to import diagrams into Avocent Data Center Planner would be nice. We have Visio diagram of racks and to utilize that instead of recreating it would help speed up the build in of a datacenter in the product.
Avocent Data Center Planner was far and away better than utilizing Microsoft Visio to manage our data center infrastructure. It provides us a centralized location for all information about our data center from the location of racks, to the devices in them, the device connections, etc. While Microsoft Visio can emulate the rack and device piece of Avocent Data Center Planner, it can't replicate its ability to provide the device connections. We have previously used Excel for that. Having one place for all of that information is also a plus for Avocent Data Center Planner, increasing the efficiency of our data center operations compared to using Microsoft Visio.
This is the most reliable platform that ensures that data is controlled successfully. It has helped our IT department utilize time used to monitor data storage disks manually. The overall cost of maintenance is lower as compared to other backup plans. It has reduced time taken for auditing our databases due to automatic data auditing system installed on this application.
A positive ROI on Avocent Data Center Planner allows us to improve our infrastructure planning by giving a visual representation of our data center so we can see where we can set up new equipment in the future.
Another positive ROI is, we can visualize wherein our data center we are either over-utilized or underutilized increasing the efficiency of our operations.
A further positive ROI is the complete record of device connections eliminated the need for remote hands to trace patch connections for troubleshooting purposes.
Finally having one place to view information on our data center is also a positive ROI. This has increased our operations' ability to manage our data center.
A negative ROI is the amount of time required to set up Avocent Data Center Planner. We had to start from scratch and recreate the Visio diagrams we already had.
Foglight has a positive impact on my company by being a complete monitoring platform that specializes in risk assessment, user diagnosis and management, and server monitoring ensuring a secure business infrastructure through predictive analytics, query analysis, anomaly detection, behavior tracking, troubleshooting, automated discovery, and more.
