Foglight vs. Spotlight

Strengths [Foglight]

• 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.)

Incentivized

Spotlight is great when you need a tool to give a quick look at a SQL server as a whole. It gives you the ability to see a lot of things, which can be vital in diagnosing problems or identifying stressors. Less great is the open-end of some of the diagnoses it makes, and things it identifies as "problems" (unless you love users coming to you and saying something like "Spotlight says there's a problem with our page latch!!!").

Incentivized

• Database monitoring
• Database management suite
• Customization (both monitors and dashboards)

Incentivized

• I love the main page that provides a color code list of all the servers so I know very quickly where to focus my attention first.
• I love how easy it is to configure new notifications.
• I love how easy it is to configure a new server to monitor.

Incentivized

• There are not many problems with this product
• Limited ability to use Foglight itself to solve problems it identifies

Incentivized

• Have not found any issues at this point.

Incentivized

Though our support needs have been minimal, we have gotten good responses when we have needed it.

Incentivized

Incentivized

I think Dell is better with its dashboard and ease of use, but SQL Sentry is better at customization. We used Spotlight at my previous company, and SQLSentry at my current company.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We have not encountered any issues and continue to keep Spotlight's version current.
• Very simple to set up and add databases. The only thing that has to happen to the database is that a user ID needs to exist.

Incentivized