Foglight

I have experienced great business insights from the operation of this product on our data and work environment. It closely monitors workflows to ensure that there is positive and regulated outcomes that meets company standards. It detects problems in early stages to avoid critical cases that can lead to higher cost and time wastage. It prepares data and all workloads to make the process of migration from our company to cloud servers more simple.

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.

We selected Foglight almost 6 years ago for its advancements in the APM space, moving toward a single pane of glass and their SaaS development. They have since abandoned the APM and SaaS offerings to focus solely on Database and Compute monitoring. This is why we are migrating 90% of our monitoring needs to a new tool.

Foglight NMS is a Windows-based platform that is light on resources. Some products I've tried have large minimum requirements, which goes along with their large price tag. Foglight NMS is priced right and based on the interfaces of the devices that need monitoring. Foglight NMS was easy to install without having to worry about separate database servers and licenses that would go with them. The console is available in both thick client and web-based which makes it quite accessible from a variety of devices and systems. A fine product that requires not much maintenance once it is initially configured for your environment.

We were previously using Oracle to monitor resources across servers and networks. In general, that product was alright but the Foglight alerts are far superior to Oracle. The business goal of using Foglight is really to minimize business interruption costs so the faster and more noticeable the alerts, the better the product is at solving our problems.