Quest Updates Foglight To Simplify APM, User Experience Monitoring 
Quest Software Inc. is shipping an update to its Foglight product for application performance monitoring (APM) and user experience monitoring (UEM), and to make modifications where needed. The features simplify APM / UEM, and respond to increased use of virtualized and cloud environments.
Quest Software Inc. is shipping an update to Foglight, its flagship application performance monitoring (APM) product with new capabilities to monitor user experience and make modifications where needed.
“Traditional monitoring frameworks (i.e. IBM Tivoli, HP Openview, CA Spectrum, etc.) commonly serve well as component level infrastructure monitors, but do have gaps for certain modern technology aspects that can be filled in a complementary fashion by other solutions, including Foglight,” said John Newsom Quest Software’s vice president and general manager of the Application Management business unit in a post to the online Foglight community this week.
Foglight is designed to fill many of these gaps in application management and ensuring user experience, especially those that arise from moving data and applications to virtualized and cloud environments, Newsom added.
He mentioned three specific examples, including
- Advanced hypervisor monitoring, and overall virtualization management
- Netflow and other traffic related monitoring; and
- Heterogeneous database monitoring and/or high fidelity database workload monitoring
More from John Newsom’s community post on Quest Foglight APM
Traditional monitoring frameworks commonly serve well as component-level infrastructure monitors, but do have gaps for certain modern technology
John Newsom
VP, General Manager
Application Management business unit
Quest Software
Foglight’s latest update adapts easily to support the needs of new and sophisticated users, while giving them the ability to identify and fix problems before they affect business and the end users, added Quest Carl Eberling, vice president and general manager of the virtualization and monitoring business unit.
Quest Foglight’s latest update features include:
- Integration with Foglight Network Management System (NMS): Network component alerts flow into Foglight so you can quickly see how they affect SLAs and end users. Built-in workflows let you quickly isolate and solve problems.
- Enhanced user experience monitoring visibility: New performance SLA reports for IT executives and content delivery network-compatible instrumentation for before/after comparisons that simplify management of the end user experience.
- Java ‘single trace’ enhancements: Low overhead Java traces can be triggered using HTTP parameter matching, while workflows trace slow Java code back to affected web users.
- Cross-platform database views: New global displays let you view the high level details on any database without having to drill down.
- Expanded single sign-on (SSO) support: Allows access to Foglight with just a user’s initial Windows credentials.
Quest APM, UEM Best Practices, Analyst Comments
Quest’s Foglight User Experience Management (UEM) capabilities deliver the visibility to address web application performance issues and ensure a high-quality user experience. Foglight captures every user interaction to help reduce calls to support, speed mean-time-to-resolution, and easily collaborate with multiple stakeholders to improve the user experience using the same data and business priorities. Foglight lets IT and LOB users answer key questions impacting user experience, including:
- How do I become aware of performance problems affecting the end users?
- Where in the application is the problem occurring and under what circumstances?
- Which users are being affected and how do I prioritize efforts to resolve the issue?
- What is the root-cause of the problem and who should I assign to resolve it?
In his community post, Newsom also mentioned how Quest customers are achieving the next level of visibility and management success.
The companies I see achieve the greatest level of success define a solid overall monitoring strategy that encompasses both the new “standard” capabilities such as APM and User Experience Monitoring, along with the now fairly commodity, historical “standard” capabilities, and then methodically evaluate what they already own against that plan… Often a blend of new and old monitoring technology is the best answer to leverage what you already own for what it is really good for, and then complement that with modern capabilities needed to evolve to the next level of visibility.
One analyst was impressed with how Quest’s latest Foglight additions make it easier for mid-sized companies to adopt APM, and let larger enterprises extend their APM capabilities.
“Quest has focused on developing an easily consumable product that is robust enough for the enterprise but simple enough for SMBs,” Julie Craig, a research director at , Enterprise Management Associates, said in a statement. “Making APM easily consumable is a significant value-add that makes this goal more realistic.
