Foglight: Turn key monitoring with automation feature set for environments with modest customization
July 13, 2021
Foglight: Turn key monitoring with automation feature set for environments with modest customization
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Foglight
- [Foglight is] used to monitor virtualized environment (VMware) Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server w/ Analytics and other physical servers and software subsystems.
- The problems it solves for are active monitoring and alerting (uptime monitoring), historical baseline and trending, surfacing changes to hardware/software, log aggregation and analysis.
- Graphing and visualization of complex data sets
- Historical baselining and trending
- Automation of common tasks for response to known issues
- Aggregation and correlation of data across time series
- Threshold limits for alerting are not easily set to custom instances or groupings (things like customizing free disk space alerts for systems with enormous volumes to alert at a different threshold % than those with smaller volumes)
- Groovy requires a learning curve/specialized skill set for modifying rule sets
- Quest (perhaps as a victim of being purchased and then subsequently sold off by Dell) has deprecated a number of the subsystem cartridges (Storage etc.) that we depended upon including the lowest common denominator one (snmp) that is used to create monitors around proprietary systems and hardware that has no other api/monitoring capability
- Support has in past taken *months* to get an answer to issues that they had already solved for under another cartridge (e.g. disabling of SMB v1 caused their Exchange cartridge to have monitoring failures - they corrected this. Odd issues with another cartridge took literally 6 months to figure out that these were related to the disabling of SMB v1 as well. This was very frustrating.
- Other products offer more advanced analytics so it seems they have been falling behind. If this were a very inexpensive product I would not fault this but the licensing for Foglight is not inexpensive.
- Completeness of solution for being able to monitor (nearly) everything from a single management plane
- Ease of use for end users / operations staff
- Virtualization optimization and reporting feature set
- Initially it was very positive until they started paring away some of the feature sets we depended upon
- We have recently deprecated Foglight in the environment and have replaced it with a combination of an APM solution, Enterprise Log aggregation and Event Management system
- The cost of the solution as the functionality was reduced lowered the ROI overall and coupled with our need of a solution that could do the on-prem and cloud simultaneously it forced our hand to deprecate.
- I still say that Quest is better at visually presenting ugly data in an intelligent manner than nearly everybody else in the space.
- GroundWork, Nagios Core, vRealize Operations, Dynatrace, LogicMonitor and PRTG Network Monitor
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.
Do you think Foglight delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Foglight's feature set?
Yes
Did Foglight live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Foglight go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Foglight again?
Yes