Foglight vs. IBM Spectrum Control

It really depends on why my colleague is evaluating Foglight. If it is for Database monitoring and management, I highly recommend it. If it is for anything else, I would encourage them to look at others in this space.

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.

• VMWare Monitoring
• Custom use of scripts and dashboard
• Performance Analysis for Database
• Remote Monitoring for Linux and Windows.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Foglight allows detecting and diagnosing performance problems simplifying hybrid environments, it is a solution that has perfect features which work in a flexible and intuitive way, it allows database performance in a safe and fast way. It works perfectly with nothing else to add.

Incentivized

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

Why didn't I give the full 10 out of 10? My problems are still: since I have been working with the software for more than 20 years, the installation on Windows hosts that are part of domain networks. In these networks, installing is nearly impossible due to group policies. In the opposite: without group policies - especially for Windows updates - you can barely manage the ISC server when on a MS Windows basis. But because the software works seamlessly after a successful installation and support is very responsive and helpful, ISC gets a 9 out of 10.

Incentivized

Foglight was chosen years ago as a replacement for Groundwork. After 2.5 years of implementing Groundwork things were still not complete and the decision to go with a more formalized solution was made. Foglight installed easily and quickly nearly across the board and the full implementation for complex infrastructure was completed (with no Professional Services) by us in under 4 months. Nagios is a wonderful toolkit but you have to be ready to build what you need. It's flexibility and breadth are excellent features but with that comes the need to define things very tightly lest you embark on the project that never ends (see above about Groundwork). Dynatrace is an excellent APM tool and has advanced analytics but as a general infrastructure monitoring tool it is actually very expensive and to be honest does not have the same focus and full feature set that it does on it's APM (which to be fair is it's wheelhouse). vROPs (we also have) is a wonderful tool but focused (and rightly so) on satisfying the VMware engineers in the crowd and doesn't put itself out there too far to make things palatable for the non-engineering crowd.

Incentivized

IBM Spectrum Control is still better than these three. Why? ISC is deployed locally within the customer's network and can receive real-time data from the customer's systems, while IBM StorageInsights is a cloud-based service offering that collects data in specific time windows. Plus, StorageInsights lacks many data sources and metrics that ISC can provide. PRTG and Checkmk are SNMP-based and can express alerting and performance monitoring in a previously configured window. They are unable to really drill down from the application via HBA, SAN, and storage controller to the volume of the storage system, and lack many metrics that ISC can provide. Also, these tools cannot predict performance or capacity growth. This is only possible with IBM Storage Insights (ISC).

Incentivized

• Positive - near instant alerts help combat potential problems quickly
• Positive - minimizes business interruption
• Positive - limits disruptions to productivity

Incentivized

• ISC select license has been "upgraded" so that IBM StorageInsights for ISC can be used. That helps especially customers who cannot maintain an on-prem installation.
• ISC can monitor and manage many systems deployed across several distant locations, which keeps us from installing ISC on every system the customer maintains.
• ISC makes troubleshooting, performance, and capacity prediction very easy when the end of the lifecycle for the current SAN and storage infrastructure is reached. This spares time and money.

Incentivized