• "Foglight Skills 101" Quick Start Guide to Foglight

    The First 80 Hours as a Foglight Admin

    View the webcast here

    This webcast covered:

    • Access to Support / Community Resources
    • Version checks and upgrade requirements
    • Deployment validation
    • Security audit
    • Alarm review
    • Report Setup
    • Access to dashboards for…
  • Making sense of vmId and hostId.. wait, what?

    Most of my blog topics come from customer questions and use cases. This is one I lost sleep over.

    The use case was to limit a disk usage rule from firing on a specific host. It got bigger when we dug in a bit, as the rule should be limited to only virtual…

  • (Another) Foglight Countdown!

    ( * This blog has been updated from last year's.... )

     

    We have all done it. We think we know the lyrics to a song. We sing them passionately….and incorrectly. Here are a few classics.

    • “Excuse me while I kiss this guy”. Correct lyric: “Excuse…
  • Adding Services to Infrastructure Dashboard

    A few years ago, I wrote this blog detailing how to get host services created on the Hosts dashboard to show up in the Service Operations Console.

    Creating a service via the Hosts dashboard is quick and easy.. but the service definition is simply the…

  • "Foglight Skills 101” Foglight Cartridge Specific Sessions

    Many of the capabilities and techniques covered by the other recorded webcasts in this index are common across whatever type of database you are monitoring.   But each platform has its own operating and processing challenges, and unique terminology.  Learn…

  • "Foglight Skills 101” Associated Uses, Products and Add-Ons

    Database cartridges allow you to monitor your database instances. But you can boost the power of your monitoring by adding one or more of these features.

    A Spotlight on Foglight – How Spotlight Users can ease their way into Foglight

    View webcast…

  • "Foglight Skills 101” Maintenance and Troubleshooting

    A well-maintained monitoring environment will be healthier and more useful.  Find out some of the key techniques to use, and places to look for help, to bolster the health of Foglight.

    Basic Foglight Troubleshooting (when things don't work...)

    View…

  • "Foglight Skills 101” Foglight Architecture

    Understand how Foglight’s architecture can affect the availability and the performance of your monitoring.


    Best Practices for Architecture Configuration & Scalability

    View webcast here

     This webcast covered:

    • Embedded vs. External Foglight…
  • "Foglight Skills 101” Workflows

    Learn how to interpret and react to various types of alarms and to problematic resource usage by workloads.  Equip yourself to track down causes of degrading performance.

    Dashboards for various IT stakeholders

    View webcast here

    This webcast covered:

  • "Foglight Skills 101” Reporting and Custom Views

    Many Foglight users wish to produce reports or custom views that visualize important key performance indicators about some of the monitored things in their environment.  Reports can be produced and shared, whether template out-of-the-box reports or custom…

  • "Foglight Skills 101” Fine-Tuning Your Monitoring

    Put to use some of the built-in facilities of Foglight to make your monitoring even more effective and valuable:  registry variables, schedules, services, and the security model.

     

     

    Find More Time for Innovation and Helping Your Business:  Invoke Variables…

  • "Foglight Skills 101” Alarms

    Foglight fires alarms when something being monitored is experiencing a lower- or higher-than-desired level, or “abnormal” behavior.  You can help Foglight understand what “reasonable” levels of performance are, and which problems result in…

  • Five ways to be more proactive about DB2 performance problems

    Before application users are affected!  That’s when everyone would like to see database performance problems addressed.  However, if you’re like many of the DB2 LUW customers I work with, and how I functioned during my DBA days, you find yourself…

  • Can you believe this Administration?!

    What’s that you say? You think it may not be appropriate that a technology blog dive into politics?

    Agreed. Instead, this blog highlights the breadth of Administration capabilities available in Foglight for Postgres.

    Administration options are available…

  • We Put It On Our Tab – Complementary Oracle Monitoring with Foglight Pt 3 (of 3) – CRS and Exadata

    This blog series discusses each of the ‘tabs’ that can be found on the Database Home page in Foglight for Oracle. These monitoring options come included at no additional cost and illustrate how broad and complete Foglight is as an Oracle monitoring solution…

  • Improve your DB2 workload investigations with the new Foglight DB2 SQL Performance dashboard

    Hello all.   I am a sales engineer at Quest, so I assist customers with Foglight for DB2 installations and evaluations.  People who manage performance of DB2 databases need a view in Foglight listing those SQL statements that have been the largest resource…

  • We Put It On Our Tab – Complementary Oracle Monitoring with Foglight Pt 2 – ASM

    This blog series discusses each of the ‘tabs’ that can be found on the Database Home page in Foglight for Oracle.

    Part 1 of the blog covers Foglight’s monitoring for Oracle’s Data Guard.

    https://www.quest.com/community/quest/performance…

  • Identify Long Running Queries with Foglight

    April 15, 2019.....Let’s give a shout out to all those men and women running the Boston Marathon today.

    Man, running for that long must be taxing. Taxing…..wait…what day is it again?

    So, as my way of giving a nod to long runners,…

  • The Wonderful World of Service Definitions in Foglight

    A UI Query can be used to add either static or dynamic components to a service definition via the Service Builder dashboard. This in turn offers a
    great range of additional things Foglight can do. This post will introduce creating a service definition…

  • Take the Shortcut - Dashboarding with UI Queries in Foglight

    A UI Query can be used as a shortcut to building a custom dashboard or report. This can save time and frustration by publishing either frequently accessed or hard to find data in an easy to use spot.

    In my Introduction to UI Queries  post, the building of…

  • Using UI Queries for Reporting in Foglight

    A UI Query can be used as an input to a report. This can simplify and offer a broader range of inputs when running or scheduling a report.

    For a refresher on creating UI Queries, this post  covers the basics. 

    WCF reports have inputs in order to properly…

  • Where can UI Queries be Used in Foglight?

    In my Introduction to UI Queries  post, the building of a simple query to return all SQL Server Agent Jobs was shown.

    Let's back up a step, and take a look at where UI Queries can be used in Foglight. This post will be updated with links as the topics…

  • Plug-N-Play! Monitor Oracle Pluggable Databases with Foglight

    In 12c, Oracle introduced support for a new architecture - multi-tenant. As such, the Container database (or CDB) was introduced. Think of the CDB as the 'super database'. This multi-tenant container database allows for many 'sub-databases'. These are…

  • How to Stop Managing Database Performance Like You’re a Character in “Bird Box”


    The average DBA, managing a cross-platform database environment. Does this even SEEM like a good idea? Hmmm?

    On a scale of one to “Bird Box,” how stressful is cross-platform database management? Uh, yeah. It’s full-blown soccer-mom-in-a-pink-sweatsuit…

  • The Foglight Countdown

    We have all done it. We think we know the lyrics to a song. We sing them passionately….and incorrectly. Here are a few classics.

    • "Sweet dreams are made of cheese”. Correct lyric: “Sweet dreams are made of these” from The Eurythmics’…