Foglight vs. IBM Spectrum Control

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

IBM Spectrum Control is very well suited for the large enterprise where there is multi vendor environment in terms of storage and host virtualization. It is not suited at all where file storage is dominant. It is capable of providing very detailed reports as it leverages the IBM Cognos for that purpose and offers very detailed customization as well. It can even provide the enterprise with the SAN management capabilities as well.

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

Incentivized

• Monitoring data from our storage servers
• Provision of data analytics

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Must extend the management and monitoring to File storage.
• Performance monitoring of non IBM equipment may also be added.

Incentivized

IBM Spectrum Control has highly influenced our decision-making process and planning based on the analytics we receive from data. It is the only unique product that I have worked with offering great services under different environments. It monitors data both inside and outside our company and vives feedback on time for planning on different programs. Optimization of data is reliable and the storage planning is done to enhance easy access.

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

• The high licensing cost if offset buy the capacity savings and the accuracy of the analytics.
• It has a positive impact on our ROI and as improved it almost 9%.