[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome, everyone, to Quest Foglight skills 101 webcast series. My name is Jessica Dipasquale, and on behalf of Quest, we are thrilled to have you joining us today. I can't think of anyone more qualified to lead today's session than our very own expert, Nishat Shaikh. And please stick around following today's event so that you have the opportunity to ask your questions live.
Noon or evening to all. A quick intro about me. I'm a senior systems consultant for Quest, specializing in Foglight cross platform databases, cloud virtualization monitoring, and other database toolsets. I've spent most of my life, over 25 years, in the world of IT. I have experience working with software organizations, banking, media, insurance, government, councils, MSPs, and logistics industries, where I have-- where I have helped organizations in business development and consistently improving their business processes and things like that.
So very quickly, so today's agenda is filled with lots of fun stuff where we will learn how to use Query Insights, how to focus on database queries that take most of the time, how to simplify alarm management and workflows, the use of alarm templates. Let's take a look at Audit UI, where all user actions and system changes are recorded. We'll also explore Swagger UI and also look at how can we redact sensitive or personally identifiable information. Within the SQL queries, we'll also look at MySQL, Postgres PI, and also a little bit of Foglight Cloud managed service offering as well.
So very quickly, what is Query Insights? Query Insights is an innovative analytical feature of Foglight that supports 11 major database types, starting from Azure, SQL DB, SQL Server, Oracle, Snowflake, Postgres, MongoDB, and much more. It's actually a game-changer for database administrators, providing real-time analytics and detailed visibility into SQL Query performance.
With Query Insights, you can quickly identify problematic queries, drill down into execution details, and understand their impact on overall database health. It is designed to help you optimize performance, reduce downtime, and also, it filters data from the collected metrics so that you could narrow down the scope of analysis to pinpoint specific queries. For example, you could look at elapsed time or executions or response time, the type of agent that you'd like to investigate, and filter that information, whether it is response time, elapsed times, execution.
By simply clicking the button here, Investigate, it takes you further into SQL Performance Investigator, which has been Foglight's-- one of the major key components where you can seamlessly investigate database problems. Whether it is you are looking at complete workload analysis at every single dimension which you could from CPU perspective, memory perspective, IO, or this could be from SQL statements perspective, T-SQL or PL-SQL blocking, logs and weight analysis. You could also track database changes, compare analysis, compare the code and execution plan changes over a period of time to make those informed decisions and to improve your database performance.
So like that, I would also like to talk about Alarm Templates, which is one of the main features in the recent releases. The Alarms Template dashboard displays the factory templates where you can take a look at different domains from different plugins that gets added into Foglight. For example, it could be active directory, AWS, Azure, or it could be Azure SQL databases, or Cassandra. For each of these templates, you can view, configure those targets, select domains, and also look at various different thresholds that can be edited as well.
So how can you use the Alarm Templates? So Alarm Templates are very easy to use. One of the key things or benefits from the factory template is you can create a new template. You can duplicate a template. You can set a default template if you had multiple templates that you needed to configure with your target databases.
Editing templates is quite easy. You can also delete a template. You can also remove those targets quite in a simplified manner.
To extend the alarm templates, another key feature is notification channels. So with the alarm templates, notification system is quite important, which allows users to receive alerts, notifications, and also events that gets detected in that monitored environment where notifications are sent through communication channels. It could be via email, or you can post it to a team's channel, for example. So all of that is quite easily possible.
Within the notification channel, you could do two things. One is you can add as many as notification channels you want. You can manage your mail server settings. You can manage your contacts, and also at the same time, you can set those email addresses by simply selecting a notification channel. You can set your email addresses too, and also copy in another team.
Once the notification channel has been created, you can also work on the body of the alarm by default. there is a body text from Foglight by default. You can customize this using your own prefix to the subject line, or you can add some contents here in order to recognize those alarms, where they're coming from.
A little bit extension to the notification channel is once the notifications and once the emails are set within the previous screen, as you saw there, now you can add notification channels to those Alarm Templates that was created earlier. As you can see in the screenshot, we have chosen a particular Alarm Template which is called Company Production, where a particular domain has been set, SQL Server, and also other types of domains have been added to this template. So you will see a particular menu option which is called notification channels, which can be clicked on to and add those relevant teams who will be receiving those emails and notifications as needed.
OK, so another new topic that I'd like to introduce with in the latest features is Swagger UI. Swagger UI allows anyone, be it your development team or your end consumers to visualize and interact with API resources without having any of the implementation logic in place. For example, currently, within the Swagger UI, we support Alarm Templates, audit logs, and also telemetry. You can very easily look at the API templates.
OK, let's talk about auditing log. Auditing log is a very interesting feature that's available in Foglight, which helps you to look at audited entries. Each entry contains specific information about date and time at which an audited action has performed. For example, name of the user who has initiated the action name of the service or action carried out for a particular alarm or an alarm that has been cleared. So all of these entries can be visually seen within the audit log.
Another interesting feature that was released in Foglight 7.1 onwards is replacing literals. Literals replace literal feature currently works globally, which scrubs strings, numbers in the uploaded SQL statements data, primarily to look at sensitivity sensitive or PII data. For example, that you can actually see if you have any select statements that looks at select at quest or select quest tiger. Foglight adds a line which says "removed by Foglight" right next to the select statement by simply redacting those sensitive information in your select SQL statements.
Replacing literals is very simple menu. So basically, you could very simply go to the settings options in the Foglight UI. And once you select replace literals, a dialog box appears where you can actually simply select yes and click save, which applies to all the databases monitored in Foglight environment.
Well, there's lots of good features that you've seen so far. So I wanted to bring to your attention. If you have not used MySQL API, and I strongly recommend, please test it out. There are some new enhancements and improved features in the latest release of Foglight 7.15.
MySQL API shows information from multidimensional aspects for normalized SQL statements, uses, IO, topweight events, and much more. Currently, it is available for download on Quest Support Portal, where you can take advantage of MySQL monitoring as well as MySQL API, which gives you deep dive monitoring aspects from multidimensional aspects.
With that, I'd also like to quickly remind you on Foglight 101 series, episode two, where you will meet my colleague Alex. He is our senior technical specialist. In the next session where he discusses why upgrade to the latest version, and the date is on 23rd of October 2024 at 1:00 PM EST.
On this note, I would also like to talk a little bit about the recent release of Foglight, which was held on August-- which was released on August 1st, 2024. Some of the key enhancements that were are on security enhancement, especially on Java JRE, where we upgraded the version to 17.11. Third-party libraries were updated.
Foglight Agent Manager enhancements like SSH libraries that we use by agents where we started to support newer encryption and newer algorithms have been added. User experience enhancements were added as well, where date format consistencies-- inconsistencies were improved in the time selectors. Other feature enhancements that were added for Foglight for databases is to-- ability to remove literals, which I just briefly described in the previous slides, is it has now we currently support for all these database sets. And a new link has been added to Query Insights dashboard. We added the ability to set PI data storage period to lower to one year auditing, kill sessions.
A lot of great enhancements have been added in the latest release, which is 7.1.5 on August 1st, 2024. With that, we also changed some newer cartridges were released. Along with that was SQL Server, Oracle, DB2, a lot of new versions were incorporated in the latest release. I would suggest please take a look at the release notes, which is available as a link there. And if you are currently using any of these cartridges, it's available for you to upgrade by downloading from the Quest portal.
I would also like to introduce you to Postgres PI. Very soon we will be announcing the Postgres PI release, where you will benefit with SQL PI feature. It contains Angular UI. We are expecting to release this feature sometime this quarter, potentially August, September 2024.
Postgres PI, very much like SQL Server PI or Oracle PI and MySQL PI gives the ability to look at data from multi-dimensional aspects from SQL statements, databases, users, client machines, programs, workloads, statistics, client statistics, IO statistics, and lot more. So a great functionality that will be added very soon in the upcoming releases as well.
Let's talk about Foglight's fully managed service and self-managed service. So far, with the self-managed service, customers have been responsible for all aspects of a service, including hardware, software, networking, or facilitating the system to manage and install Foglight. With Foglight's fully managed services where we are going to introduce you to Foglight Cloud. Quest handles all the aspects of services, including troubleshooting, security, patching, and tuning, where this can reduce the need of manual updates and also look to look at many aspects of Foglight cartridges or plugins, et cetera. Without any delay, let me introduce you to Foglight Cloud.
So what is Foglight Cloud? Foglight Cloud is a managed software solution that combines many of the capabilities with Foglight for Databases and Foglight Evolve. Foglight for Databases covers 13 different types of databases and including Foglight Evolve, which consists of infrastructure monitoring, Hyper-V, VMware Virtual Cloud, cloud monitoring on Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and containers. One of the key benefits of Foglight Cloud is time to value. So basically, you will have the extensive capability to manage the service where which reduces total cost of ownership, continuous updates, automatic updates, zero downtime, and it also minimizes the users and boosts efficiency and users' contentment.
What I'd like to do now is I'd like to show you a quick glance of Foglight Cloud, where Foglight Cloud has simplified intuitive screens with the ability to integrate with multiple databases, as you can see, cloud infrastructures, any database Cloud Manager from Azure, AWS, Google cloud. On the infrastructure aspect, we cover all infrastructures, whether it is Windows, Linux, and also at the same time fiscal infrastructure monitoring, where you can also manage access to Foglight Cloud users with which provides simplified roles like administrator, owner, operator, read-only users as well.
With that, I'd like to conclude Foglight 101 series episode one, which has Foglight new features where I'm looking forward to seeing you there. Register today. Use the QR code on the screen to join the Foglight 101 series, episode two, Why Upgrade? And thank you very much for listening to me.
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