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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HashiCorp Nomad
Score 9.6 out of 10
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Nomad, from HashiCorp, is presented as a simple, flexible, and production-grade workload orchestrator that enables organizations to deploy, manage, and scale any application, containerized, legacy or batch jobs, across multiple regions, on private and public clouds. Nomad's workload support enables an organization to run containerized, non containerized, and batch applications through a single workflow. Nomad is available open source, or via a supported enterprise plan.
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.)
Nomad is well suited for organizations who wish to tackle the problem of cloud computing with as little opinion as possible. Where competing tools like Kubernetes limit the concept of "batteries included," Nomad relies on engineers understanding the missing components and filling them in as necessary. The benefit of Nomad is the ability to build a system out of small pieces with the cost of having more complexity at a system level compared to alternatives.
Nomad only handles one part of a full platform. Expertise and vision are required in implementing an entire system that is functional enough for an organization to rely on. This includes other tools to handle things like secrets, service discovery, network routing, etc.
Nomad is delayed in some modern functionality, like features for service-mesh and open tracing. These features are on the tool's roadmap, but there's currently no native support. These paradigms can be established still, but require more expertise outside of Nomad itself.
Nomad is not the leading tool for this space, and as such risks being left behind by tools with much greater support, such as Kubernetes.
Nomad's primary competitor is Kubernetes, specifically its scheduling component. Kubernetes is a much more complete system that will handle more things than job scheduling, including service discovery, secrets management, and service routing. There also exists a much larger community support for Kubernetes vs Nomad. One might say Kubernetes is the safer choice between the two. Kubernetes is the complete "operating system" for cloud computing, but with it includes complexities that are "Kubernetes" specific. The decision really comes down to a mindset of monolith vs components. With Kubernetes, I would argue you choose the entire system as a whole. With Nomad, you design your system piece by piece. There is no wrong answer.
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.
Nomad has allowed our organization to deploy quicker and more frequently with a lower failure rate.
Nomad has brought in consistency from an operations perspective.
Nomad's performance allows us to scale infinitely while providing functionality that reduces mean time to repair (canary deploys, versioning, rollbacks, etc).
